PRIVATE BUSINESS

London Local Authorities Bill [Lords]

Considered; amendments agreed to; to be read the Third time.

Oral Answers to Questions

SCOTLAND

The Secretary of State was asked—

Common Fisheries Policy

Alex Salmond: What recent representations he has had from the Scottish fishing industry on the common fisheries policy; and if he will make a statement.

Anne McGuire: My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland and I have had no specific representations from the Scottish fishing industry recently, but as Scottish Members we have received written communications from the Scottish Fishermen's Federation. We are fully aware of the industry's concern and I am a member of the ministerial steering committee for the UK-wide fisheries study undertaken by the Prime Minister's strategy unit.

Alex Salmond: Is the Minister aware that, as of today, if half the Scottish white fish fleet goes to the major haddock fishing area at a time of record haddock stocks, it will be forced to discard the fish caught dead over the side into the sea? Everyone knows that the map on which the regulations are based is wrong—it is admitted by the European Commission, the Scottish Executive and fisheries Ministers here—and over the past four weeks we have been promised appropriate changes within days, so as of today what is the Minister going to do to prevent thousands of tonnes of quality fish being used to feed seagulls? What exact intervention does the Secretary of State propose to make to prevent that fishing disaster and environmental obscenity?

Anne McGuire: The hon. Gentleman, as usual when he tries to advocate a case, goes into hyperbole. I think that references to an environmental disaster, which I have read in this morning's press, do no credit to his case. However, there is no need for the Secretary of State to step in because, as the hon. Gentleman knows, the fisheries Department has been in weekly contact with the Commission since the beginning of the year to deal with the variations that he has raised. We hope that those outstanding issues will be resolved soon. The Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr. Bradshaw), the Minister with responsibility for fisheries, is awaiting the proposals from the Commission, and I understand that it is treating it as a matter of some urgency.

Gavin Strang: Has my hon. Friend had time yet to read the report of the Royal Society of Edinburgh inquiry into the future of the Scottish fishing industry? Does she support the recommendation that the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea should consider abandoning virtual population analysis as the principal method of determining stock sizes? Those are, of course, the stock sizes that the European Union uses to determine the total allowable catches and quotas for our fishermen.

Anne McGuire: I thank my right hon. Friend for the question. The Royal Society of Edinburgh has published an authoritative report over the past couple of days. It would be premature for me to comment on any one of the 35 recommendations, but I know that the acting fisheries Minister in Scotland has already said that he welcomes the report and, obviously, we will take those recommendations into consideration when looking at the strategy unit report. It is also worth highlighting, however, that the Royal Society of Edinburgh has clearly indicated that there is absolutely no merit in our withdrawing from the common fisheries policy and that we have to resolve these issues within the framework of a reformed common fisheries policy.

Peter Duncan: The Minister will recall that in January I asked her whether she could give me one positive result arising out of Scotland's membership of the common fisheries policy over 30 years. She has had nine weeks to consider the matter. Can she give me one positive outcome?

Anne McGuire: The hon. Gentleman is being naive or disingenuous or both, because the reality is—he and his party need to realise it—that, if we did not have a framework for fisheries management in the North sea under the common fisheries policy, we would have to invent one. We share our fisheries stock and our fisheries area with other members of the European Union, so the question that he asks is totally naive.

Alan Reid: Does the Minister agree that the common fisheries policy has failed because it is over-centralised, and that it needs to be replaced by a new system managed by regional management committees, involving fishermen working with Government and scientists in order to produce a policy that is both sustainable and fair in enforcement?

Anne McGuire: The hon. Gentleman will be aware that one of the platforms on which we conduct our negotiations in the European Union is that we are keen to have reform of the common fisheries policy, with more decentralisation of stock management. We are probably nearly, if not totally, at one on that.

Whisky Strip Stamps

Pete Wishart: When he last met the Chancellor of the Exchequer to discuss the introduction of whisky strip stamps.

Alistair Darling: I have regular discussions with my right hon. Friend the Chancellor on a wide range of matters.

Pete Wishart: I get a strong sense that the Chancellor intends to pursue the introduction of these costly and fraud-prone strip stamps in tomorrow's Budget, which would have a dramatic effect on the whole Scotch whisky industry, including Dewar's, Blair Atholl and Edradour in my constituency. Will the Secretary of State urge him, at the eleventh hour, to consider properly the National Audit Office report that concludes that the financial basis for strip stamps is at best unreliable? Will he also ensure that the Scotch whisky industry's own sensible counter-fraud proposals are once again thrust in front of the Chancellor before he brings that red box into the Chamber tomorrow?

Alistair Darling: I have seen the NAO report, and the hon. Gentleman is right in that it says that far more work needs to be done on the exact figures, but what is not in doubt is that fraud is a problem. Having spoken to the Scotch Whisky Association, I know that it is aware of that. He will appreciate that, as the Budget statement is just over 24 hours away, it might be best to wait and see what the Chancellor proposes, and I do not think that I should say any more in advance of that.

Michael Connarty: First, I want to put on record my thanks to my hon. Friend the Economic Secretary for meeting Mr. Vivian Imerman, the owner of Whyte and Mackay, at my request to discuss the problems that may arise with strip stamps on whisky bottles. At Grangemouth in my constituency there will be an added cost to the production process, putting an extra £4 million on top of the £20 million that is being invested there, but the biggest problem is the pay-back time for the excise duty. It is possible to have a fiscally neutral pay-back time, above 140 days. Will my right hon. Friend take that up with the Chancellor to ensure that, if the system is to be introduced, it is at least fiscally neutral and the tax does not cripple the industry?

Alistair Darling: My hon. Friend is right in that there have been many discussions, including the meeting to which he referred. However, I repeat that, with the Budget statement so imminent, it would not be wise for me to speculate about what might be in it.

John Thurso: May I first draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members' Interests?
	The Secretary of State will be aware of the pitfalls of unintended legislation. Perhaps he will recall the advice given two years ago by many Members of Parliament to the Treasury in respect of the oil industry—advice that went unheeded, with the result that many jobs were lost. As the Scotch spirits industry represents about 68,000 jobs in Scotland, will he urge the Chancellor not to play fast and loose with this important industry and to listen to the wise counsel from throughout the House, that strip stamps will not produce the revenue gains that he intends and could have serious consequences for the industry?

Alistair Darling: I was not aware of the hon. Gentleman's entry in the Resister of Members' Interests, but I will have a look at it. If he is pleading guilty to liking the stuff, I expect that a few more of us could join him. He mentioned the oil industry and the whisky industry. Of course, the Government are alive to the importance of both, but we must also be alive to other considerations for the wider public good. I assure him that, whatever the Chancellor announces, he will have had regard to all the relevant factors. Normally, I like to be helpful to the House, but at this stage, having been a Treasury Minister, everything tells me that I should say nothing further.

Ian Davidson: While not wishing to say anything further, will my right hon. Friend none the less take into consideration the fact that the National Audit Office, in examining the statistical evidence of fraud, accepted that there was a possible variation in its scale between £10 million and £1 billion? Given that wide range, does he accept that more work needs to be done before a final decision is taken, and that that would allow more time for the industry's own proposals to be examined more rigorously?

Alistair Darling: There is a limit to how many more times I can say nothing in particular, despite seven years' experience of trying very hard. The point that my hon. Friend makes about fraud is similar to the one made by the hon. Member for North Tayside (Pete Wishart). What is beyond doubt—here, there is common ground—is that fraud is a problem in the spirits trade. The question is how best it can be dealt with. As I have said many times—subject to you, Mr. Speaker, I may do so on a few more occasions—given that the Chancellor is making his Budget statement tomorrow, I cannot usefully or prudently add anything to it.

Peter Duncan: I doubt whether the House has quite grasped the notion that the Secretary of State describes. Last month, we established that he was not consulted before the Government again raised the spectre of whisky strip stamps, so he may not have heard the Economic Secretary to the Treasury confirm that the industry's counter-proposals were received in time for consideration, and that their timing should not of necessity rule them out. Given that they were submitted in time and would eliminate more fraud more quickly, what is the basis for the Chancellor's not being persuaded by them?

Alistair Darling: As I said just a few moments ago, the Chancellor is coming here tomorrow afternoon—perhaps that fact has passed the hon. Gentleman by—to deliver something called the Budget, in which he sets out his proposals and takes into account all the matters that have been raised. In order to vary my answer, I ask the hon. Gentleman to reflect on the fact that, had Conservative policies continued during the past seven years, an extra £1 in duty per bottle of whisky would have been charged.

Peter Duncan: Perhaps I can elicit a further response from the Secretary of State. Whose side is he on in this debate? Will he stand up for the 40,000 Scots jobs that are at risk, or is he the new "Gordon's gopher" in the Scotland Office, doing the bidding of one who would be future leader? By way of observation, whose side is he on?

Alistair Darling: The hon. Gentleman is confused as to just how many jobs there are in the industry, which does not surprise me. As I discovered the other day, this is the man—a member of the Conservative and Unionist party—who has predicted that if it is elected, it will destroy the Union of the United Kingdom. This is the same man who thinks that the Mersey Tunnels Bill is Scottish business, so it is hard to take him entirely seriously. But as I have said on many occasions, I am in the very happy position of always being in complete agreement with whatever the Government happen to be doing.

Electoral Arrangements

George Foulkes: When he expects to announce the membership of his commission on common boundaries and electoral systems.

Alistair Darling: The process to establish an independent commission to look at boundary differences and voting systems in Scotland is under way. I hope to announce its chairman and membership shortly.

George Foulkes: I welcome the setting up of this commission, not least because I was one of the people who suggested that it be set up. The Secretary of State can answer this question directly as it does not relate to the Budget or any other such matters. Can he get the commission up and running as soon as possible, and will he ensure that it reports in time for us to legislate for common boundaries for the Scottish elections in 2007?

Alistair Darling: I doubt whether this issue will be covered in the Budget, so perhaps I can be a little more helpful. As I told the House when we discussed these matters, I am anxious to get the commission up and running as quickly as possible. The question of voting systems is a live issue in Scotland, and no good would be served by simply letting things drift. I have written to the leaders of all the parties in this House with Scottish representation, asking them to put forward names for consideration. That process is under way, but I am anxious to get the membership established as quickly as possible, because I want the commission to start its work and to reach its conclusions as quickly as it can, insofar as that is consistent, of course, with its obligation to look at all these matters thoroughly.

James Gray: It is now more than a month since the Secretary of State announced—on 9 February—that the commission will be set up and will start work "straight away", and that he will consult the other parties about its chairmanship and membership. More important, will the Secretary of State confirm what he meant when he said that the commission
	"will consider the case for change"?—[Official Report, 9 February 2004; Vol. 417, c. 1151.]
	Is it possible that it will conclude that there should be no such change? Could it perhaps agree with the hon. Member for Cunninghame, North (Mr. Wilson), who said of the Bill in question:
	"I cannot find any conceivable public interest that will be served by it. On the contrary, it is, as we all know, simply the legislative follow-up to a political fix."—[Official Report, 9 February 2004; Vol. 417, c. 1180.]
	Could the commission come to that conclusion?

Alistair Darling: What the commission will not be able to do is to reopen the question of whether there will be a reduction in the number of Members of Parliament representing Scottish constituencies. If I remember rightly, that is one of the matters that my hon. Friend the Member for Cunninghame, North (Mr. Wilson) was concerned about. It cannot do that, but it will examine the consequences, assuming that the changes to Scottish local government go through, of having four different systems for electing people in a comparatively small country. As to the hon. Gentleman's first point, I am anxious to make progress in setting up the commission. In that respect, if he would like to have a word with the leader of his Scottish party about replying to my letter, that would be most helpful.

Mark Lazarowicz: When the commission meets, will my right hon. Friend ensure that it reflects not just on the problems caused by having five different electoral systems in Scotland or the problems of having different boundaries for MSP and MP constituencies, but on the fact that different boundaries will apply—as well as to MSPs and MPs—to local authorities, local enterprise companies, health boards and many other aspects of government? Will the Secretary of State work with the First Minister to ensure that the commission begins to tackle those problems, too?

Alistair Darling: It will certainly look into the problems that arise from the lack of coterminous boundaries between Westminster parliamentary constituencies and those that apply in Holyrood, but I am anxious not to pile too much work on the commission. Otherwise, the point made by the my right hon. Friend the Member for Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley (Mr. Foulkes) is relevant, and we will end up with the commission never reporting, which would not be helpful. There is some concern about the fact that, for the next few years, boundaries will not be coterminous, which can lead to all sorts of difficulties and misunderstandings. This is a matter on which there is almost a parliamentary consensus that something must be done, but probably no consensus on what precisely should be done. I have explained what issues need to be examined and I should like, through you, Mr. Speaker, to urge party leaders who have yet to reply to me to do so rather quickly if they have any names to recommend.

Heroin Addiction

John Mann: What assessment he has made of the use of (a) subutex, (b) naltraxone and (c) methadone in the treatment of heroin addicts in Scotland.

Anne McGuire: The specific forms of treatment for individuals are regarded as a decision for medical practitioners and the treatment regimes for heroin addicts in Scotland are devolved and a matter for the Scottish Executive.

John Mann: It is unusual for Scotland to keep its achievements under wraps, but the methadone programmes in Scotland are significantly more advanced and better than those in England and Wales. Does the Minister agree that, having been ahead of the game by some 10 to 15 years, Scotland should now catch up with other countries, such as Sweden, France and Australia, that are even further ahead? They not only have effective methadone programmes in place, but have moved on to even more successful programmes using buprenorphine and naltraxone.

Anne McGuire: I thank my hon. Friend for his interest in the way in which we have tackled this terrible blight in Scotland. I know that he has actively campaigned on the issue of drug misuse and treatment in his own constituency and that he facilitated a recent heroin inquiry, which has driven some of the agenda in his own area. He is right to say that we have invested significant energy and resources in tackling drugs in Scotland: additional resources have certainly been invested in recent years. I will draw my hon. Friend's comments to the attention of my colleagues in the Scottish Executive.

Financial Sector

Jim Sheridan: What assessment he has made of the recent performance of the financial sector in Scotland.

Alistair Darling: The financial services sector in Scotland remains of crucial importance to the health of the Scottish economy. Output has continued to grow in recent years and the sector currently employs more than 100,000 people in Scotland.

Jim Sheridan: I thank my right hon. Friend for his answer, but does he share my concern that despite the excessive profits, which of themselves are welcome, the workers who have generated them are worried about losing their jobs through outsourcing? Some of the profits should be reinvested into training employees who are rightly concerned about losing their jobs.

Alistair Darling: I fully understand people's concern about the outsourcing of some jobs within the financial services sector, particularly in call centres. However, it is encouraging that some institutions—the Royal Bank of Scotland, for example—examined the position and decided to keep the work in-house. In any growing and dynamic economy, some jobs will be relocated elsewhere in Europe or other parts of the world, but it is encouraging that more jobs are being created in Scotland, including in some call centres. I notice that a recent independent survey found that many people in the financial services sector expected to be recruiting this year. That is encouraging.
	Finally, in relation to the general profitability of Scottish companies, it is a very good thing that there are so many profitable institutions in Scotland. If we want a growing economy and more employment in Scotland, we need to encourage the growth of profitable companies. That is the best way for our economy to thrive in the future.

David Marshall: I welcome the success of the Scottish financial sector, but does my right hon. Friend accept that most people would agree with my hon. Friend the Member for West Renfrewshire (Jim Sheridan) that some of the profits are excessive and unfairly distributed? Those profits benefit the few, not the many, and employees and consumers should get a fairer and better deal from the financial sector. Will my right hon. Friend convey to the Chancellor of the Exchequer the suggestion that a windfall tax be levied on excessive profits?

Alistair Darling: No. I have to tell my hon. Friend that I am not attracted to that. The distribution of a company's profits is a matter for its shareholders or members, and employees must sort out their remuneration with their employers. However, the problem in Scotland has too often been that we have not had enough companies that were profitable. More people would be employed if we had more profitable companies, and such companies would expand and continue to do well. Scotland happens to be the home of some of the largest banks in the world. I, for one, would like to encourage that. I am sorry that I cannot agree with my hon. Friend's proposal. Instead, we should concentrate on trying to get more profitable sectors in the Scottish economy, because that is the way to achieve long-term success.

ADVOCATE-GENERAL FOR SCOTLAND

The Advocate-General was asked—

Devolution

Alan Reid: What devolution issues have been raised with her since 10 February.

Annabelle Ewing: What devolution issues have been raised since 10 February.

Anne McIntosh: What devolution issues she has considered since 10 February.

Lynda Clark: Since 10 February, there have been 39 devolution issues intimated to me. Almost all related to criminal matters, including pre-trial delay, the system for setting the punishment part of life sentences, failure to communicate information required by sea fishing measures, and self-incrimination. In the civil sphere, minutes related to the refusal of scheduled monument consent and breach of prison rules.

Alan Reid: The Advocate-General referred to sea fishing measures. I draw her attention to the Fisheries Jurisdiction Bill. Does it contain anything that she believes would be incompatible with European law? If so, why? What consequences would there be for the UK if the Bill were to become law?

Lynda Clark: I have a copy of the Bill, and have even read it. I hate to disappoint the hon. Gentleman, but it is not really for me to advise him about the Bill. The Bill is interesting, but has one or two obvious problems.

Annabelle Ewing: The Advocate-General is Scotland's senior Law Officer at Westminster. Has she seen the full advice from the Attorney-General on Iraq?

Lynda Clark: The hon. Lady is right to say that I am the senior Scottish Law Officer here, but I remind her that the convention means that it would not be appropriate for me to give any information about that.

Anne McIntosh: This is the first Question Time since the Advocate-General gave notice that she is to leave the House at the next election, so it is appropriate to pay tribute to the work that she has done. Her close neighbour the Secretary of State has distanced himself from her on the Front Bench today. I should have liked there to be a contest between them, but I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman will wish her well in her career.
	The Advocate-General said today, for the second consecutive month, that one of the devolution issues raised with her was pre-trial delays. Will she put my mind at rest that she will preserve the 110-day rule to the best of her ability? It has served extremely well to protect people accused of a crime from unnecessary delays before their cases are brought to trial, but I gather that it may be at risk. I hope that she can assure the House that the matter will be resolved, and that the 110-day rule will be kept in Scotland.

Lynda Clark: I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her good wishes and hope to be with her for a little longer. She knows that the 110-day rule is a matter of criminal procedure that falls within the remit of the Scottish Executive. It has been an admired feature of the Scottish system for many years and ensures that accused are tried within a reasonable time and not kept in prison. It has been changed in the past, however, and the European convention on human rights bears upon trial within a reasonable period. The Scottish Executive have examined the matter and will consider it in the round, and we will see the results in due course.

CONSTITUTIONAL AFFAIRS

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State was asked—

Supreme Court

Tam Dalyell: What representations the Department has had from Scottish lawyers on the establishment of a supreme court.

Christopher Leslie: The Department for Constitutional Affairs received responses from eight people readily identifiable as Scottish lawyers and, separately, from eight Scottish legal organisations in response to the Department for Constitutional Affairs consultation paper on the creation of a supreme court for the United Kingdom.

Tam Dalyell: What contribution will be made from Scottish resources—court fees paid by civil litigants in Scotland—to the running of a supreme court?

Christopher Leslie: The question of running costs will be scrutinised during the passage of the Constitutional Reform Bill. In England and Wales, costs are recovered by full-cost recovery from the fees imposed on litigants. That would obviously make sense in other jurisdictions but it is clearly a devolved matter for Scotland, and we will continue to discuss it with the Scottish Executive.

Nick Hawkins: After that non-answer, which reveals that the Minister does not know the answer to the question, perhaps the Minister will acknowledge the huge concern north of the border at the lack of consultation by the Government on the supreme court and its creation. He mentioned that he has received representations, but will he have the grace to acknowledge that there is strong concern within the Scottish Parliament, which was not consulted properly, the Scottish media and all the Scottish legal organisations? This is yet another Government shambles—they do not consult properly and just indulge in constitutional vandalism.

Christopher Leslie: I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman noticed that when the Scottish Parliament debated many of those issues the motion was passed overwhelmingly. We have discussed the fee issue with the Scottish Executive. As I have said, we have full-cost recovery in England and Wales for civil litigation, and it would make sense in other jurisdictions too. However, the matter is devolved, and it is therefore important to discuss it with the Scottish Executive so that they can help to resolve it, which is a straightforward process.

Annabelle Ewing: Will the Minister accept that if the UK Government bulldoze the proposals through, it will, as senior legal figures in Scotland have stated on numerous occasions, be at the expense of the independence and integrity of the Scottish legal system?

Christopher Leslie: No, not at all. It is right that the Bill is scrutinised properly, and the other place has made it known that it would prefer more scrutiny. I hope that the concern about scrutiny is genuine and not just a mechanism to oppose the Bill wholesale. The principle—separating the judiciary from the political realm—is simple and important, and I would have thought that the hon. Lady would welcome it.

Kevin Brennan: If he will make a statement on the progress of plans to establish a supreme court.

David Kidney: What the timetable is for establishing a supreme court.

Christopher Leslie: The Government are committed to the objective of the Constitutional Reform Bill being enacted in this Parliament.

Kevin Brennan: I thank my hon. Friend for that answer. I understand that the objection to the supreme court by Lord Chief Justice Woolf, which might have caused some delay, is not based on the principle of whether we should have a supreme court. Indeed, he might be in favour of it if it has a new building. On that basis, will my hon. Friend draw the attention of Lord Chief Justice Woolf to the Lyons report on the devolution of jobs away from London and suggest using a building such as Cardiff city hall? That building would be available for use, and the Government could house the supreme court there and satisfy Lord Chief Justice Woolf at the same time.

Christopher Leslie: My hon. Friend is right in that many hon. Members and noble Lords are keen to know the location of the proposed UK supreme court, and we are working on those proposals. However, it would be wrong and potentially commercially prejudicial to our case if we were to start disclosing preferred options. My hon. Friends might seek to locate such a body outside the capital city, but I personally think that it would be best to have a UK supreme court based in the UK's capital city.

David Kidney: This is not a bid for Stafford to host the new supreme court's building, welcome though justices of the supreme court would always be in Stafford if they chose to visit. As the House has modern procedures for pre-legislative scrutiny, including ad hoc Joint Committees with members of the other place, and for the carry-over of Bills from one Session to the next, would it be possible to withdraw the Bill in the other place and start again here?

Christopher Leslie: Following the vote that took place in the House of Lords last week and the Lords' decision to have a Select Committee scrutiny process, we are in discussion with other parties about exactly what that would entail. Our intention is to ensure that the legislation is enacted in this Parliament, and we do not see any reason why that should not be possible. We are happy to discuss the scrutiny process as long as it is not just a device to prevent progress.

David Heath: Now that we have this delay—occasioned entirely by the incompetence of the Bill's genesis—will the Government use it profitably by engaging with the Select Committee in the other place to find satisfactory means for judicial appointments, to satisfy the requirement for judicial accommodation and to strengthen judicial independence? When the Bill comes to this House, whether carried over or not, will the Minister ensure that it is debated on the Floor of the House, as befits a major constitutional issue, and that we have sufficient time to examine all the consequences of one of the most important Bills in this Parliament?

Christopher Leslie: I realise that the hon. Gentleman is cynical about our desire to see scrutiny of the proposals, but we do want to engage in dialogue, here and in the other place, about the Constitutional Reform Bill. It is an important measure, and because of its constitutional nature it would be subject to special scrutiny arrangements, including proceedings on the Floor of the House. We want to ensure that we have a genuine measure of scrutiny of the proposals, but if Opposition parties are really intent on killing the Bill they should say so, instead of hiding behind the cloak of scrutiny.

Alan Duncan: Let me say in passing that the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords can sit wherever it wants, even now. I echo the question from the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath). Our view is that there is no need for a supreme court, and we are pleased that ill-conceived legislation to set one up and abolish the position of Lord Chancellor will receive some much-needed scrutiny. In the other place, the Constitutional Reform Bill will now be thoroughly analysed and dissected, but the danger is that when it arrives here it will receive less mature study. Indeed, it may simply be rammed through. I am afraid that the Minister's answer was unsatisfactory. Will he give a firm undertaking—which he did not give a moment ago—that the Bill, as with every constitutional Bill in the past, will have all its legislative stages taken on the Floor of the House? All the Minister did was refer to special scrutiny arrangements. What might those be, in terms of parliamentary procedure? Will he also confirm that all stages will be handled by a Secretary of State?

Christopher Leslie: I am not quite sure what the hon. Gentleman's last comment means, but it is important that we have good scrutiny in both Houses. The House has devised thorough and long-standing mechanisms for scrutinising all Bills, and I do not think that there would be any specific need to change completely the way in which we scrutinise this Bill compared with other Bills. We will obviously listen to all Opposition parties' views on, and proposals for, the Bill's scrutiny requirements through the usual channels. However, let us be absolutely clear that the proposals are quite simple. On the supreme court, for example, do we want our judiciary to be in the political realm or not? I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman needs to think about that for several years. I suspect that he is opposed to the proposal, and if he is, he should say so. I think this House's scrutiny capabilities are quite adequate.

Dennis Skinner: Is it not becoming increasingly obvious that the Tories, with only a tiny proportion of democratically elected Members of the House of Commons, are using their in-built majority in the House of Lords to scupper proposals such as the Constitutional Reform Bill, as they did a few days ago? Will my hon. Friend convey the impression of a lot of people on our side of the House—the democratic side of the House of Commons—that Labour MPs in increasing numbers are fed up to the back teeth with the shenanigans of the Tory majority in the House of Lords, and that the proposal to abolish the House of Lords is gaining strength week after week? Let's get on with it.

Christopher Leslie: It is difficult to follow the emphasis that my hon. Friend put on the point, but he is right to say that the Conservatives have more peers than there are Labour Members of another place. That is clearly a situation that the Conservative party would wish to preserve for ever, hence its opposition to change—that is the nature of its conservatism. I hope that the Constitutional Reform Bill will have the chance to be scrutinised in this House. It would be wrong for the other place to prevent the House from scrutinising the Bill, because this House is clearly supreme in our Parliament.

Patrick Cormack: Will the Minister now confirm precisely who was consulted, and by whom, before the reshuffle last July when we were suddenly told that there was going to be a supreme court? When he answers, will he confirm that the Tories do not have a majority in the upper House?

Christopher Leslie: On the hon. Gentleman's latter point, if he had been listening to my words, he would know that I said that the Conservatives have more peers in the other place than the Labour party. If that is not clear enough for him, I do not know what is. I was not a Minister at the Department for Constitutional Affairs before the reshuffle, so I was not personally involved in the discussions in the lead up to that. I suspect that that is probably a question for the Prime Minister.

Courts (London)

Simon Hughes: What plans there are for the amalgamation of courts in London.

David Lammy: I am advised by the Greater London Magistrates Courts Authority that it proposes to amalgamate the Barnet and Hendon magistrates courts, and also the Bow street, Horseferry road and Marylebone magistrates courts, although no date has yet been set for completion of that. The Court Service is investigating the co-location of West London county court and West London magistrates court.

Simon Hughes: I am grateful for the Minister's helpful reply. He may be aware that there was a great outcry last year when there was a proposal for three family court centres in London, but none in south or west London. The Greater London Magistrates Courts Authority changed its mind and provided five, which was welcome. Will he ensure that before any decisions are agreed, there is careful consideration of whether all parts of London, and all Londoners, can get relatively easy access to the courts? Will he ensure that the courts are cheaper for the authorities to attend and that there is a fair distribution of courts of all sorts throughout the whole of London so that justice can be done not only for all, but in all parts of London, all the time?

David Lammy: Access to justice was at the core of the Courts Act 2003, which passed through the House towards the end of last year. The unified Court Service will ensure that differentiation between the magistrates courts committees on one hand and the Court Service on the other will be brought to an end. We are able to get that flexibility so that justice is seen to be done locally throughout London and, indeed, the rest of the country.

Electoral Register

Alan Whitehead: What plans the Department has to undertake a review of the current arrangements for recording those eligible to vote.

Christopher Leslie: Although my Department has no plans to carry out such a review, the independent Electoral Commission has reviewed electoral registration procedures, which formed part of the proposals in its "Voting for Change" report in June 2003. The Government are currently considering the recommendations made by the commission.

Alan Whitehead: Does my hon. Friend accept that if we look at the latest returns for registered parliamentary electors we see what is effectively a slow collapse of registration in a number of urban and inner-city areas? Does he accept that if that trend continues, it will in the long term undermine the integrity of the electoral process? Will he consider measures targeted on urban areas to rectify the problem?

Christopher Leslie: My hon. Friend will know that my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane) recently held a debate on this matter in Westminster Hall. I know that it is of concern to a number of colleagues who have noticed changes in the electoral register, either inflating or decreasing the numbers. In many cases, that is due to population change, but perhaps local returning officers are being more accurate and assiduous in putting names on the register, ensuring that there is no duplication and so forth. We have new powers for rolling registration, and we have given returning officers extra powers to canvass, making sure that our registers are accurate. I hope that that gives my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr. Whitehead) some assurance.

Nicholas Winterton: Does the Minister accept that the integrity of the electoral register is vital, and that there should be safeguards so that when people register—people have registered cows, dogs and children—checks are undertaken by the appropriate officer to ensure that all those who are registered genuinely have the right to vote? Bearing in mind that we are moving towards having more postal voting, what additional safeguards will be introduced to ensure the integrity of the electoral register?

Christopher Leslie: I agree: the sound integrity of our electoral register is important. I have not visited the hon. Gentleman's constituency and seen any instances of cows and dogs being registered, as he suggests, and to my knowledge they are not on the register in my constituency. We want to make sure that the new powers available to registration officers are used to ensure, by door-to-door canvassing as well as the paper canvass process, that we get the best possible electoral register.

Jury Service

Gordon Marsden: What assessment has been made of the adequacy of employee protection for those called for jury service.

David Lammy: The Government strongly support the idea that people should feel secure in the workplace. The Minister with responsibility for courts is in discussion with the Minister for Work to ensure that adequate protection is put in place for those employees summoned for jury service.

Gordon Marsden: My hon. Friend is aware of the case of my constituent who was employed on a construction site when he was summoned for jury service. He accepted, and informed his employers. They wrote direct to the Court Service without his knowledge in an attempt to have him excused, and when that request was refused, they sacked him. Does my hon. Friend agree that that raises disturbing questions about employee protection, particularly when employees have not been employed long enough to have recourse to an employment tribunal? Will he, his colleagues and officials look at other mechanisms, such as temporary protection and the arrangements that I understand pertain in Canada?

David Lammy: My hon. Friend is right. The Contempt of Court Act 1981 can be brought to bear where it can be seen that an employer has interfered with the judicial process, but we need to do more in this area, particularly as we begin to implement the Criminal Justice Act 2003 to ensure that more people on the electoral roll are able to do jury service. People need to feel secure in their employment when they are doing jury service. We have undertaken to do more; conversations are going on within government, and I hope that we will be able to come forward with something shortly.

All-postal Voting Pilots

Angela Watkinson: What action has been taken to prevent fraud in all-postal voting pilots.

Christopher Leslie: Any electoral system is potentially open to fraud, but it is important to remember that a number of electoral offences and safeguards are already in place, including an offence of applying undue influence on a voter and the offence of personation. The European Parliamentary and Local Elections (Pilots) Bill builds on existing sanctions so that, for example, it would be an arrestable offence to cast a postal vote as someone else without their consent in the pilots. Other measures are being used, including measures to combat ballot paper forgery and the use of secrecy warnings on postal voting literature.

Angela Watkinson: I thank the Minister for his reply, but he will be aware of the opportunities for fraud in houses in multiple occupation, where there is a frequent turnover of occupants, all of whom receive their mail through the same letter box. Will he therefore consider introducing special safeguards to ensure that the declarations of identity that accompany ballot papers from those properties relate to the person named on the ballot paper?

Christopher Leslie: It would not be right to inflate the notion that there is a big problem with houses in multiple occupation and postal voting, because there is no specific evidence that there is. However, I accept the hon. Lady's concerns, which she shares with other hon. Members, about a single letter box serving a number of flats. Recently, in Brighton and Hove, a team visited houses in multiple occupation to make sure that ballot papers were properly delivered, and we want to build on that, possibly in the all-postal pilots.

LEADER OF THE HOUSE

The Leader of the House was asked—

Members' Services

Eric Illsley: What proposals he has submitted to the Select Committee on the Modernisation of the House of Commons on the provision of personal digital assistants to hon. Members.

Phil Woolas: My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House has submitted no such proposals—

George Osborne: Why not?

Phil Woolas: Hang on! However, my right hon. Friend welcomes the fact that the Information Committee has looked at personal digital assistants and other hand-held technology, and has already made recommendations to the advisory panel on Members' allowances, which, for the benefit of the House, was formerly known as the Speaker's advisory panel.

Eric Illsley: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his reply. He will be aware, as most Members are, of the huge growth in e-mail to Members and the time needed to deal with the vast amount of electronic correspondence. Does he agree that the provision of hand-held personal digital assistants will enable Members to access the PDVN system remotely, provided that the two are linked, giving them more time to deal with that growing electronic mail?

Phil Woolas: My hon. Friend is a technophile, and is using the new technology to the advantage of his constituents. I am pleased to tell the House that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House is also a technophile, and is keen to make progress on the matter. As I said, proposals have been submitted to the advisory panel, and I invite my hon. Friend to write to the Senior Salaries Review Body and put the case for the new technology.

Patrick Cormack: As someone who is not a natural technophile, may I ask the Minister whether he is aware that Members can become so submerged in information that they are unable to make decisions?

Phil Woolas: It is patently obvious to all Members of Parliament that it is entirely possible to become submerged in information and not get on with the job in hand. However, in response to the hon. Gentleman's serious point, Members of Parliament, whatever their party, are better able to serve their constituents if they have access to new technology. I am sure that he agrees that the new provisions that have been introduced have benefited our constituents.

Human Rights Act

David Heath: Whether the ministerial statement under section 19 of the Human Rights Act 1998, of compatibility with the European convention on human rights, is reviewed at each stage of consideration of a Bill.

Peter Hain: The Minister's statement of compatibility with the ECHR is formally reviewed when a Bill passes to the second House. However, it is intended that Parliament should be able to take the convention rights into account as part of normal debate. For this reason Ministers in charge of Bills will wish to be as forthcoming as they can in replying to questions from any Member about compatibility at any stage of the Bill's passage.

David Heath: I am grateful to the Leader of the House for that answer, but I am not sure that the process is sufficiently complete. We have a certificate from a Minister when a Bill is published, but it is nonsense that is not repeated at any stage, despite the fact that a Bill can be almost entirely rewritten during consideration in Committee or on Report. Surely it would be more appropriate if, at each stage, a Minister said that the Bill still complied with the Act and, if it did not, explained why not. I remind the Leader of the House that the amendments may not be in the name of the Minister. They may have been tabled by others who do not have access to the same legal advice as Ministers.

Peter Hain: I understand the hon. Gentleman's point. He is aware that the Joint Committee on Human Rights monitors legislation that is before Parliament and plays a valuable role. If any incompatibility issue arose, it would spot that. Equally, the hon. Gentleman will understand that it is an obligation under the Act that we come into line with ECHR compatibility, unless a statement is made giving very good reason why we should not. So there is no way in which any Minister will find himself or herself out of compliance with that requirement of the legislation.

Oliver Heald: I am glad that the Leader of the House mentioned the Joint Committee on Human Rights. I wanted to ask him about the Committee's report published today, which states that there is a risk that emergency regulations made under the Civil Contingencies Bill would violate the European convention on human rights. The Government have promised that an amendment will be tabled so that the maker of regulations under the Civil Contingencies Act would have to make a section 19 statement. Does the Leader of the House plan to spread that principle more widely to other secondary legislation? What happens if the statement says that the regulations are not compatible? Would they still be legally enforceable?

Peter Hain: I think that the answer to the hon. Gentleman's last question is yes. I will look afresh at the points he makes, but, as I say, it is a requirement on all Ministers to inform the House about compatibility, and in the event that there are very good and persuasive reasons for incompatibility, that must be explained to the House as well. I do not think that that arises in this instance.

Standing Committee Papers

Kevin Brennan: If he will propose to the Select Committee on the Modernisation of the House of Commons that it examine ways of simplifying Standing Committee papers.

Phil Woolas: My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House accepts that the provision of information to Members—those serving on Standing Committees and others—may benefit from some modernisation.

Kevin Brennan: I thank my hon. Friend for that encouraging answer. Is it not the case that the purpose of the Modernisation Committee is not to deal with the trivial issues that are sometimes debated such as hours, but to improve the opportunities for Members to scrutinise the Executive? Is it not daft that in Standing Committees Members have to consult at least four different bits of paper when they are trying to follow a Bill's progress, including the explanatory notes to the Bill, the selection list and the amendment paper? Could not all that be on one screen, on which hon. Members could see what was being discussed, what difference the amendment would make and what the explanation for it was? Why cannot we get on and modernise, as has been done in other institutions, such as the National Assembly for Wales?

Phil Woolas: I saw the frown of the Chairman of the Procedure Committee deepen with every question. The answer to the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, West (Kevin Brennan) is yes. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House accepts that there is a case for reassessing from time to time the form of all our Committee papers, and if there is a way of making the scrutiny of Bills easier for all Members in all parts of the House through modernisation, that should be considered. I suggest that my hon. Friend write to the Leader of the House in his capacity as Chair of the Modernisation Committee to ask how that may be taken forward.

Nicholas Winterton: I am grateful to the Deputy Leader of the House for mentioning the Procedure Committee. I personally believe, as I think the Leader of the House might, that the matter may well be one for the Procedure Committee. Bearing in mind the fact that Members chosen by you, Mr. Speaker, chair Standing Committees, I should have thought that the Chairmen's Panel should also discuss the matter. The hon. Member for Cardiff, West (Kevin Brennan) asked a very good question. Will the Leader of the House discuss the matter with me and consider which bodies of the House could take it forward?

Phil Woolas: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that question. I can confirm that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House would wish to do that. We all recognise the difficulties that arise in relation to amendments in Standing Committees, especially when several are tabled overnight. I am sure that all Members are grateful for the guidance of the Chairmen of Standing Committees on discussing amendments in accordance with the right procedures. It therefore makes sense, as the hon. Gentleman suggests, to consult them.

Paul Tyler: Does the Minister recognise that it is not only the hon. Member for Cardiff, West (Kevin Brennan) who finds the proceedings of Standing Committees incomprehensible? There is a great deal of evidence that the public find those proceedings completely beyond them. Given that they are the people who send us here, and that they are often interested in the way in which we deal with legislation, do the Minister and the Leader of the House propose to consider the problem from the point of view of accessibility to the public? The proceedings of Standing Committees contrast sharply with those of Select Committees, which the public do find comprehensible.

Phil Woolas: I thank the hon. Gentleman for that question. The Modernisation Committee has been taking evidence from members of the public around the country, and one of the findings of that consultation exercise exactly confirms his point. If it is sometimes difficult for Members to understand these procedures, they are often impenetrable to members of the public. The thrust of the Modernisation Committee's work is accessibility to, and understanding of, this House; that is one of the prime goals of this Government. I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman's support for that goal as a member of the Modernisation Committee. In achieving it, however, we must not forget the checks and balances of our system that give rights to Back Benchers: that would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Developments in vCJD

John Reid: With permission, Mr. Speaker, I should like to make a further statement about the action that Government are taking following a blood transfusion incident involving variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease—VCJD. On 17 December last year, I informed the House about the implications of the incident and gave an undertaking to keep it informed of any major developments. As you will know from our conversation last night, Mr. Speaker, I regret that an inaccurate press report appeared before I was able to make this statement to the House. I believe that it has been replicated in another inaccurate press report this morning.
	The House may recall that my Department had become aware of a patient who had contracted variant CJD after receiving a transfusion of blood from a donor who went on to develop variant CJD himself. That is a possible, not a proven, causal connection. I told the House that a further 15 patients had been identified who had received transfusions from donors who had gone on to develop variant CJD. I said in my statement of last December that the Health Protection Agency, working with the National Blood Service, was in the process of contacting the individuals concerned. I can now report that all surviving individuals have been contacted and informed about the circumstances of their case.
	As on previous occasions when we have become aware of new information about blood and variant CJD, we have ensured that action has been taken on a precautionary basis to reduce the risk of a transmission of the disease. I stress that we are acting on a precautionary basis—the basis on which we have introduced a range of measures since 1997. For instance, since 1998 we have ensured that blood products are made only from plasma imported from countries that are free of, or have very few cases of, variant CJD. We introduced leucodepletion—removal of the white cells—of all blood for transfusion from 31 October 1999. Two years ago, in 2002, we instructed the National Blood Service to use only imported fresh frozen plasma for the treatment of children born after 1996. That will come into effect for newborn children this month, and will be extended to older children as soon as is practicable.
	In the light of the transfusion incident that I reported last December, the chief medical officer asked the expert Advisory Committee on the Microbiological Safety of Blood and Tissues for Transplantation to consider whether there was a need to take any further measures on a precautionary basis. That request was made with the proviso that such measures should not have an unmanageable adverse impact on the safety or availability of blood. We are therefore talking about a balance of risk, given that, with a need for about 800,000 transfusions and 3 million blood components a year, the dangers of a shortage of blood are obvious to all.
	Our experts met on 22 January to discuss a number of options for further strengthening the protection of the blood supply in addition to those that I outlined to the House in December. On the basis of all the information available, and taking a precautionary approach, our experts concluded that the United Kingdom should exclude from donating blood people who have previously received transfusions of whole blood components since January 1980. They also advised that additional measures should be introduced to improve further the effectiveness of the use of blood in hospitals.
	I have accepted the chief medical officer's advice to accept that recommendation of the advisory committee. The group of people excluded from donating blood will therefore be limited to those who confirm that they have received a transfusion in the UK since 1 January 1980. It is generally accepted that there would have been no exposure to BSE—bovine spongiform encephalopathy—in the UK before that date.
	I stress that the risk attaching to that group of blood donors is uncertain, but we are taking those measures as a precaution because the risk may be slightly higher among that group than among the population as a whole. Excluding those donors will inevitably lead to a reduction in the supply of blood available for transfusions. Although the National Blood Service estimates a loss of 52,000 donors, I am pleased to report that it has put in place measures to help to compensate for those losses, and hospitals are being encouraged to make the best possible use of blood. In the meantime, I should like to take the opportunity to thank the blood donors in the group affected by the change for their contribution towards saving and improving patients' lives.
	At the meeting on 22 January, the Advisory Committee on the Microbiological Safety of Blood and Tissues for Transplantation acknowledged that a period of some weeks would be needed to allow the blood services to put in hand the preparation of communication material for donors and the setting up of training programmes for blood service staff. It recommended 5 April as the date for implementation, and the National Blood Service asked us to time our public announcement to coincide with a point three weeks before implementation. That is why I am making this statement to the House today. Those steps are being put in motion as I speak.
	The advice of the Advisory Committee on the Microbiological Safety of Blood and Tissues for Transplantation and the National Blood Service is that we should identify people who have received a previous blood transfusion by self-reporting, using questionnaire screening, when they come forward to give blood. That action is being implemented now. Another group of potential donors will be people who had an operation in the past but are unsure whether they had a blood transfusion at that time. I have asked the advisory committee to consider whether any further action is required as part of the general review of the measures, and to report back to me.
	Earlier in this statement, I mentioned that this process was about balancing risks. I now turn briefly to the other part of the process, which involves ensuring that blood in hospitals is put to the best possible use. I consider blood that has been donated voluntarily to be a precious resource for our health service. We therefore have a responsibility to donors and patients alike to ensure that it is used to the best possible effect. That said, it is clear that the best-used blood is often the unit of blood that is not used when it is not needed. I am, therefore, concerned that blood transfusions should be made only where there is a clear clinical need.
	It has been widely acknowledged that more blood is ordered and more is used than is clinically necessary. Considerable efforts have been made over the past five years to encourage more efficient use of blood in clinical practice. In 2002, all four of the United Kingdom's chief medical officers launched an initiative to ensure that the "better blood transfusion" strategy is an integral part of NHS care, to make blood transfusion safer, to avoid unnecessary use of blood in clinical practice and to provide better information to patients and the public. We have seen good progress in taking this initiative forward.
	I am pleased to report that NHS trusts have been introducing improved arrangements to oversee all aspects of transfusion, and developing protocols for transfusion practice, based on national guidelines. Work is also being undertaken in a number of other key areas such as the development of additional guidelines for trusts on the resources needed to implement "better blood transfusion" and the establishment of the role of specialist practitioners of transfusion. While this progress is encouraging, we cannot be complacent. The expected loss of supply as a result of today's announcement means that we need to increase our efforts in the more appropriate use of blood. The chief medical officer is producing a revised approach to push forward the "better blood transfusion" strategy.
	I hope that my statement has provided the House with a clear indication of the path that we have chosen and why we have chosen it. I would like to end by stressing two things. First, as I said last December, we are following a highly precautionary approach. I understand that people may have concerns about the implications of this announcement, but I would emphasise again that this action is being taken because of an uncertain but slight risk. People should, indeed, continue to have a blood transfusion when it is really necessary. Any slight risk associated with receiving blood must be balanced against the significant risk of not receiving that blood when it is most needed.
	My second point is that, particularly at this time, people who can do so should continue to donate blood. Blood donation is a safe procedure and people should continue to donate blood regularly. We place great value on those who already donate and would welcome new donors. I am sure that the whole House is deeply grateful to all of them.

Andrew Lansley: I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving me the opportunity to see his statement in advance. I am sure that hon. Members are also grateful to him for returning to the House to give further details, which he undertook to do on 17 December. His statement will come as no great surprise, in the light of some of the research that has been published since his December statement. I am particularly aware, for example, that in The Lancet of 6 February, Llewelyn et al reported on the surveys of patients identified by the national CJD surveillance unit as receiving blood transfusions. Looking particularly at the case that the Secretary of State highlighted in his December statement, they concluded:
	"The chance of observing a case of vCJD in a recipient in the absence of transfusion transmitted infection is about 1 in 15,000 to 1 in 30,000."
	So, it clearly must be right, in the light of such an analysis, to proceed on the basis that blood transfusion was the source of infection in the case in question. Indeed, Herzog and others, in The Lancet of the same date, considered the risk of intravenous transmission, concluding that it should be treated on the same precautionary basis as the avoidance of consumption of infected beef products.
	The case in question, which the Secretary of State told the House about on 17 December, arose from a blood transfusion in 1996. The precautionary process of leucodepletion was instigated, as he said, in 1999, so the first question that arises is, what has been the relevance and effectiveness of that process? The particular case in question does not tell us whether leucodepletion has succeeded in reducing or even removing the risk of infectivity being introduced through blood transfusions. What conclusions, if any, have he and his advisers reached on the effectiveness of that process over the last four and a half years?
	Turning to the measures that the Secretary of State has announced, I am aware that he says that the 5 April date is intended to give the National Blood Service time to respond. Will he confirm that it will also, presumably, allow an accelerated call to donors, should that be necessary? I understand that the blood service may have about a week's supply, which is, in the circumstances, a very healthy stock of blood to have available, but it needs to be replenished continuously, so it is important to ensure that there is no drop-off in donations, even in the short run.
	Can the Secretary of State confirm, as he did previously, that there has been advance co-ordination with the Scottish and Welsh Administrations? I understand that the National Blood Service looks after England and north Wales, but clearly there are separate arrangements in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Perhaps he can confirm that those Administrations are taking parallel measures.
	Can the Secretary of State also explain the intentions in relation to those who have transfusions in future? Presumably, those who have had transfusions since 1980 will be excluded, but the logic of his statement is that those who have transfusions after 5 April this year will not be excluded, because they, by definition, will receive blood that we have made as safe as we can make it.
	The Secretary of State talked about the measures that the chief medical officer is taking for a revised approach on "better blood transfusion". I do not wish to be difficult with the right hon. Gentleman, but I have to say that he described a process. He did not describe any outcomes, so perhaps he will tell us what progress has been made in reducing the use of blood products in the national health service to the minimum level that is clinically necessary, because we need to compare that progress inside the NHS with a reducing profile of blood donations.
	The figures that I have received suggest that 2.38 million units were donated in 2001–02 and 2.365 million in 2002–03, while 2.31 million units is the estimate for this financial year and that for next year is 2.275 million. That is a 1.5 to 2 per cent. reduction year on year in the number of blood donations. What the Secretary of State has described today represents a 3.2 per cent. reduction in the donor base, so this year, other things being equal, there might be a 4 to 5 per cent. reduction in blood donation.
	In those circumstances, it is important either for the marketing campaign to be able to compensate for that reduction—presumably, the Secretary of State knows that there is no certainty about that—or for NHS use of blood donations to make additional progress. However, there is no measure in the right hon. Gentleman statement of the progress made up to now.
	What further research is the Secretary of State putting in hand? I understand that he has taken advice from the Advisory Committee on the Microbiological Safety of Blood and Tissues for Transplantation, but when I asked him recently about advice from the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee he said that that body would be included, as others would. SEAC has particular expertise in the infectivity and transmission of BSE. We know that, so far, 146 variant CJD cases have been identified, so information is progressively being established about the characteristics of persons infected with new variant CJD and conclusions can be drawn. At some point, it will be necessary to balance the harm that could be done by such highly precautionary measures—even if it could be mitigated—against the unknown benefits of a highly precautionary approach.
	In that context, in the past disposable instruments were used for tonsillectomies. Known harm clearly resulted from the practice for an unknown and unquantifiable benefit, and that decision had to be reversed. I would hate to reach the position where harm resulted from a persistently highly precautionary approach.
	The Secretary of State said that the use of imported fresh frozen plasma that is virally inactivated is to be extended to older children. That development was first announced in August 2002, with the intention that such plasma would be used from the end of 2003. The right hon. Gentleman is now saying that virally inactivated fresh frozen plasma will be used for newborn children. Presumably a timetable exists for extending that use to children born since January 1996. When does the Secretary of State anticipate that timetable will, as a matter of some importance, be completed?
	The right hon. Gentleman did not mention the infectivity of urine-derived products. In the past, the Department has said that it does not acknowledge any such evidence, but, in The Journal of Biological Chemistry in 2001, Shaked and others suggested that there was such a route of infectivity. If highly precautionary approaches are sought, perhaps the Secretary of State will comment on his attitude to that aspect.
	I entirely share the right hon. Gentleman's regret at newspaper stories this morning and would not wish the Government to proceed other than on the basis of scientific evidence. Continuing research is needed because a highly precautionary approach is being taken in the absence of evidence about the true route of infectivity. If the Secretary of State is right and the public listen carefully, they will recognise that that is the right way to proceed. Blood is a vital resource for the NHS and we greatly value those persons who donate it. Blood must be used efficiently and effectively, but we must also encourage people to give blood to the NHS in the hope that that will meet the health service's continuing needs.

John Reid: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his comments and particularly for his reference to the manner of publication and reporting. His reaction, as we would expect, was responsible. I hope that any reporting of this issue will be sober and non-sensational.
	The hon. Gentleman referred to a series of publications and produced some statistical evidence. I will not comment on their substance, but I agree that a range of statistical evidence has been placed in the public domain, albeit not of a causal nature. We proceed with caution, despite the fact that there is no proven causal relationship between the description I reported in December of a possible link between someone who had donated blood and someone who had received blood.
	At the time when leucodepletion came into effect, our experts believed that the only source of infectivity was through white cells. Leucodepletion is the removal of white cells from the plasma. More recent research suggests that there could be infectivity in other blood components, which is why we are taking further action. As the hon. Gentleman knows, we are guided by experts. We believe that leucodepletion has been effective and efficient in countering risks. I am certainly not aware of any evidence to the contrary.
	The hon. Gentleman referred to the chief medical officer's "better blood transfusion" strategy, which is currently being reinforced. Hospitals are encouraged to run pre-operation assessment clinics and to advise patients of the various alternatives. Hospitals are also encouraged to use the technology that allows doctors to rescue and give blood back to patients during an operation. That technology is readily available and should be used when a patient needs more than two units of blood.
	It is too early to make an overall assessment of the complete effectiveness or otherwise of the strategy but we continually monitor it and believe that it is making an improvement. When we have completed a comprehensive and robust assessment, we will place that information in the public domain.
	The hon. Gentleman expressed the hope that the three weeks before 5 April will be used at least in part to encourage people to donate blood to compensate for any effect that today's statement may have. I share his hope, which is part of the reason for giving the blood service proper time to produce publications and circulars before this statement.
	The hon. Gentleman is correct in stating that current blood stocks are relatively high—from memory, we have 62,000 units. This morning, I spoke with, among others, the manager of the National Blood Service, Dr. Angela Robinson, and with individuals in Scotland. My hon. Friend the Minister of State spoke to our colleagues in Wales yesterday. We confirm that we shall do everything possible to ensure that the level of blood donations is maintained.
	The decision to import fresh frozen plasma from the United States to treat certain groups was taken to reduce the possible risk of variant CJD. There have been no reported cases of vCJD in the United States and we thought it important not to introduce different risks with this initiative. Viral inactivation of US-derived fresh frozen plasma was therefore introduced in this country.
	We hope to complete by the end of this year our plans for ensuring that all children are treated using the fresh frozen plasma method. We hope that that timetable will not slip.
	My hon. Friend the Minister responded to a recent question on urinary infection. There is no evidence of urinary infection occurring—although, as we adopt a precautionary approach, we obviously keep an open mind. I cannot report the specific contents of the discussions with the spongiform encephalopathy expert group, but I will write to the hon. Gentleman on that point.

David Hinchliffe: Over the years, I have met a number of families whose members have suffered from variant CJD. The view commonly held is that Governments have not been as open and frank about the problem as might have been hoped. I want to place on record my appreciation for the fact that the Secretary of State addressed that concern in his statement before Christmas and in his statement today. Those who have had to deal with this terrible problem in relation to family members will also appreciate the fact that the Government have been open and honest and have come to the House as soon as possible to give the information that has been available.
	I want to press the Secretary of State on one point. He has referred to the fact that there will be some reliance on self-reporting by future blood donors about whether they have had transfusions since 1980. My experience of self-reporting in the NHS is that it is somewhat unreliable on occasions, and I would welcome his comments on whether we have the capacity in relation to electronic records to ensure that when there is no self-reporting of previous transfusions, that fact is comprehensively checked before individuals are allowed to donate.

John Reid: I give my hon. Friend a straight answer: we do not have that capacity in relation to records; otherwise, we would not be relying on the normal method of self-reporting. It is not an entirely proactive dependency, because when people currently go to donate blood, they are screened in relation to a range of issues and materials, and that is when the questioning will take place. That leaves an outstanding question, as my hon. Friend says, as some people may not intentionally deceive but may be unable to remember, perhaps in relation to the circumstances of being operated on, or may be ignorant as to whether they received blood. I have therefore asked the expert group to consider further what might be done in that respect. All this information is considered on the balance of risk.
	I make no apology for stressing once again that no proven, causal connection has yet been established between blood donation and the blood recipient, in relation to the transfer by blood of variant CJD. We are taking a highly precautionary approach, however, in relation both to being as open as possible when information is given to us and disseminating it as quickly as possible, and in attempting to minimise any possibility of avenues remaining that we have not closed off.

Paul Burstow: First, may I thank the Secretary of State for his courtesy in allowing sight of the statement well in advance, which has provided a chance to reflect on the issues that he has brought to the House's attention? He has done that in a timely fashion, for which I am very grateful.
	The Secretary of State says that he is taking a highly precautionary approach. Clearly, securing the supply of blood for transfusion is a key concern. Can he therefore amplify that part of his statement on supply, and tell us what measures he is taking now to safeguard it? What plans does he have, immediately and in the longer term, to increase the numbers of blood donors, not least because, at the moment, only about six in every 100 people in this country donate blood? Is the National Institute for Clinical Excellence to be involved in any way in undertaking work on the use of alternatives to transfusion, such as erythropoietin and the use of patients' own blood? Can he comment on the timeline that has been discussed in respect of making available US-sourced blood plasma for older children, which we hear will be by the end of the year? What about other at-risk groups, such as haemophiliacs?
	Can the Secretary of State say what assessment has been made of the future availability and safety of non-UK sourced blood plasma? The right hon. Gentleman has referred to the report and work being done by the chief medical officer. Can he tell us when he expects the revised approach to the blood transfusion strategy to be published, and whether that strategy revision will include a more co-ordinated approach, involving the National Patient Safety Agency, in order to reduce risks? In particular, what plans does he have to deal with concern about the risk of the re-use of surgical instruments after brain biopsies, and is new guidance planned in respect of that, to deal not only with those cases in which vCJD has been diagnosed but in other cases?
	I understand that the Department is currently undertaking work on a risk assessment of possible vCJD infection in large pools of plasma and the effects of dilution. Can the right hon. Gentleman tell us when that work will be concluded and when the results will be published?
	Finally, can the Secretary of State say what support is offered to those affected donors to whom he has referred today, and to others who might be concerned? Will there be more than just leaflets and information? For example, will other services and support be offered in those cases in which it might seem appropriate?
	The Secretary of State is absolutely right: blood is a precious resource; we must do everything possible to safeguard the supply in this country; and we must applaud those who give, and encourage more to do so.

John Reid: On the question of whether support will be available, I certainly hope that it will be, not only from the National Blood Service but from NHS Direct and other parts of the NHS. As for the expert group, which is looking, almost incident by incident, at each of those dependent on blood plasma, many cases need to be examined. Obviously, the risk in those cases is even less than the low risk that we have discussed today, because the nature of plasma is that it is a reservoir normally constituted from plasma from a range of people rather than from one person. Nevertheless, great efforts are being made by the expert incident group to examine that risk and to see how it can reassure itself and any recipients as quickly as possible. I cannot give him a finish date for that—he will understand that it is laborious even compared with some of the other laborious work in connection with this matter—but I am sure that it is being done as fast as possible and always in a manner that is commensurate with getting the information correct.
	The hon. Gentleman mentioned the question of stocks. As I said earlier, stocks are pretty healthy at present. The exclusions that I have mentioned today will, it is estimated—it is not a hard and fast number—reduce the number of blood donors by about 3.2 per cent. and the number of donations by about 3.6 per cent. In absolute numbers, that is about 52,000 people, who would give about 56,000 donations. That is comparable with the annual net reduction, and with extra publicity and extra effort, we can make sure that that stock is maintained.
	In relation to the timeline on children, the only information that I can give the hon. Gentleman is what I said earlier: it will happen at the end of the year. We do not believe that any problem exists with the US-derived plasma that we have received. In common with the hon. Gentleman, I thank those who donate blood.

Tom Clarke: I thank my right hon. Friend for his carefully considered and sensitive statement. In common with my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mr. Hinchliffe), I remind him about those of us who have families in our constituencies who have had to deal with the dreadful trauma of vCJD over a number of years, and who have now formed a network in Scotland, England, Wales and even Northern Ireland. Those families are only too happy to offer whatever experience they can and to be consulted by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and others. They, too, will greatly welcome what he has had to say about research and blood transfusions and his appeal that people should continue to make blood donations.

John Reid: Yes, indeed. I know that my right hon. Friend has taken a great deal of interest in, and given a great deal of support to, those who have found themselves in difficult circumstances because of this issue. Of course, I have spoken already to our counterparts in Scotland—I spoke to the Minister there this morning. I may, however, have given the wrong impression—I understand that the Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Miss Johnson), was unable to contact the Minister in Wales last night, but I know that our officials have been in close touch throughout. This is an issue that does not recognise national borders within the United Kingdom, and obviously, we will work closely together on the matter.

Lady Hermon: For the benefit of those who may be alarmed by his statement, will the Secretary of State comment on improvements in treatment of those with vCJD? Will he also reflect on the courageous decision of his hon. Friend the Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Mr. Browne), who, as the then Minister responsible for health in the Northern Ireland Office, authorised a new technique for the treatment of a young man in Belfast whose condition then improved?

John Reid: Yes indeed. I recall that case. While we are not entirely convinced that the treatment is truly effective, we did understand the anxiety that people would feel should there appear to be a form of treatment available that we were not testing, and we decided to carry out a pilot involving an English strategic health authority. This is a very difficult disease to come to terms with, and some of its implications are clear even from the screening technique mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mr. Hinchliffe). There is, in fact, no test that can be applied before symptoms appear. Nevertheless, we continue to pursue treatments that might prove effective.

Brian Iddon: My concern is for the 15 or so individuals identified in the statement. Some have already contracted NHS blood transfusion-borne diseases such as hepatitis C, and others still require blood transfusions. Can my right hon. Friend assure us that that small number of people will continue to be monitored closely, and that if they require medical advice they will receive the best available from the NHS anywhere in the country?

John Reid: Yes, I can. As my hon. Friend says, 15 recipients were identified. One is now deceased, although as far as we know there is no connection with vCJD. A further recipient has been discovered since then, in January. We do continue to monitor all those people closely. My hon. Friend is right: they deserve the support of the NHS, which must itself monitor their conditions. I promise him that that will happen.

Mark Francois: The Secretary of State mentioned the importance of maintaining adequate stocks. In that context, may I raise an operational point? The right hon. Gentleman will know that the National Blood Service now employs call centres to remind donors to turn up for sessions. I understand, however, that problems have been caused when the message has not been passed on to teams going out to collect blood. When that happens, more donors turn up than the service would normally prepare for. That places tremendous strain on staff running the sessions, and also means that donors who are not covered by the new booked-appointment system must wait for an inordinate amount of time. Some become disillusioned and go home.
	Next time the right hon. Gentleman has discussions with the chief executive of the NBS, will he raise that problem? If liaison between call centres and teams collecting blood is improved, staff will not be under such pressure, and donors—whom we all applaud—will not become disillusioned.

John Reid: We are trying to modernise and improve the National Blood Service, along with every other part of the NHS. In view of what I have said today, it is particularly important for us to maintain the utmost effectiveness in terms of logistics and such matters as collection, and I shall ensure that the hon. Gentleman's comments are brought to the attention of those in the blood service.

Dai Havard: As my right hon. Friend will know, I have been concerned for some time about the supply of blood and its security. I am also concerned about the quality of care and the use of blood for the largest group of recipients, cancer patients.
	We had the same discussion last time my right hon. Friend made a statement. I know that NICE is considering the use of alternatives, and that it is also being considered by the All Wales Medicines Strategy Group; but will my right hon. Friend ensure that not just an incremental change but a step change is involved, and that alternatives are immediately used as the default for cancer patients when that is possible? If that happens, my right hon. Friend need not face a crisis in blood supply. However, I echo his call for people to give blood.

John Reid: I know of my hon. Friend's interest. EPO, in particular, is an alternative to blood transfusion, especially for cancer patients suffering from anaemia following chemotherapy.
	My hon. Friend has done a great deal of research, and I know of the benefits that he believes this will bring to cancer patients. I also know of the knock-on effects for future supplies of blood, and for the NHS generally in terms of potential savings and bed bays, which my hon. Friend has mentioned in the past.
	My hon. Friend has made a strong case for EPO, but I know he will understand that that is only one side of the argument. Some argue that EPO may only be useful to a minority of cancer patients, and may not be effective enough to be used as a standard treatment in most cases. We have asked NICE to look into the matter. It will consult on the draft scope for its appraisal by June, and the final guidance is expected to be published by the end of next year. I hope that the appraisal will be objective, and will assess various points of view.

Roger Williams: As the Secretary of State will know, the BSE outbreak and the appearance of vCJD in humans has caused a great deal of financial cost and human sorrow. Part of the financial cost has been caused by the need to invoke the precautionary principle, which is always expensive, because we do not have the fundamental scientific knowledge about the infective agent, its transmission and the way in which it carries infection. Is the Secretary of State satisfied that we are investing enough in fundamental research? Is there a balance to be struck between that investment and the cost of invoking the precautionary principle?

John Reid: The pursuit of knowledge in this as in every other area is costly. Taxation is a finite resource, and there is an almost infinite demand on it. The other night I met some people whose children had cystic fibrosis, and then met others to discuss motor neurone disease. That illustrated the extent of the demand. I think, however, that we are investing as much in scientific research as is commensurate with need—some £500 million or £600 million. The Medical Research Council is investing another £500 million. We always want more, but we ascribe to this matter a degree of seriousness that is commensurate with the investigations that are taking place. That is why I have come to the House twice in the last four months to report on what some may consider relatively minor steps. Given the importance of the issue, I think it as well to be open and let all Members know what we are doing.

Henry Bellingham: The Secretary of State said that he believed that blood transfusions should only be given in cases of clear clinical need. That struck me as a rather strange observation. Surely no blood transfusion should be given unless there is a clear clinical need. Is the Secretary of State saying that some transfusions have been unnecessary, or that medical technology is advancing?

John Reid: I am saying that, although we have healthy stocks now, it is more important than ever for us to ensure that blood is being used efficiently. Indeed, the chief medical officer's strategy lately has been to inform all involved in blood transfusions that they should be given only when absolutely medically necessary. Blood is an extremely precious resource. I do not suggest for a moment that people are being comprehensively profligate in their use or expenditure of blood in operations, but we have shown in the past when seeking efficiency that we can cut down on the use of blood without cutting down on good medical practice.

Evan Harris: I would like to ask the Secretary of State about the 15 patients who are potentially in a contactable group in respect of the risk of contracting CJD. How is he handling them? Are they on a confidential database from which they are not allowed to remove their names, as suggested by the CJD incidence panel report of October 2001? What was the result of the consultation that took place to a deadline of January 2002 on how that group was to be dealt with? What are the implications for that group in terms of being kept on a register? Indeed, what are the implications for the many more patients who are possibly exposed to a lower risk through pooled products? There do not appear to have been any further documents from the incidence panel following the consultation.

John Reid: To put it simply, those people are being fully supported and fully informed. As I have said, 14 of the original 15 recipients identified are alive. An additional one was discovered in January. Five of those received leucodepleted red cells after 1999. The earliest transfusion involved in those cases was in 1993 and the latest one was in 2001. I mentioned during the previous statement that the National Blood Service was trying to trace all the patients concerned. It has now done so and the Health Protection Agency has arranged for them to be contacted.
	Without going into any individual's details, I can tell the hon. Gentleman that, in conjunction with each recipient's doctor, the HPA intends to undertake a review of how the advice was communicated to each patient and to try to ensure that access is provided to expert counselling and to appropriate follow-up health checks. In response to the questions about the two reports that were published some two years before I became Secretary of State, I have to tell the hon. Gentleman honestly that I do not know the answer to his question, but I will write to him about that if I can.

Points of Order

Clare Short: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I rise to raise a point of order about a misleading report published today by the Select Committee on Defence entitled "Lessons of Iraq". Paragraph 358 of the report states:
	"It has also been suggested that DfID's"—
	the Department for International Development—
	"role in post-conflict planning was constrained by the attitude of the then Secretary of State towards the prospect of military action. Although our witness from DfID denied that this was the case, we remain to be convinced."
	That assertion is completely false. I think that it is very bad practice indeed, as well as rather rude, for a Select Committee that could have asked me to provide evidence on that question to fail to do so and then to insert into its report a statement that is so inaccurate and misleading.
	The reality is that DFID pressed the Ministry of Defence to prepare for its Geneva convention and Hague regulations responsibilities because, at the end of a conflict, in the absence of order, the occupying power has responsibility for immediate humanitarian needs. Those preparations were made and food and other supplies ordered and put in place shortly before military action began.
	DFID also worked with the United Nations, the Red Cross, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, suitable non-governmental organisations and many countries that opposed the rush to war, so that we were fully prepared to support humanitarian relief as soon as there was order, and to support reconstruction efforts as soon as a UN mandate was put in place. Unfortunately, the UN and the United States State Department, which had made preparations for reconstruction, were pushed aside by the Pentagon, which took over the lead for reconstruction in Iraq—

Mr. Speaker: Order. The right hon. Lady is now making a personal statement. It is a point of order that she has raised, so I have to rule on that point of order. I have to tell her that the Chair does not have any responsibility for the content of reports from Select Committees. She may wish to take the matter up with the Chairman of the Committee.

Angus Robertson: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I seek your advice about the rules of the House relating to Ministers making comments ahead of the Budget. At oral questions earlier, the Secretary of State for Scotland confirmed that he was opposed to the introduction of a windfall tax on the financial services industry, yet he would not say whether he supported the expensive introduction of fraud-prone strip stamps on whisky bottles. While it is clearly a matter for him whether he wants to support the whisky industry and its workers, can you confirm that no rules of the House bar Ministers from giving their opinions during debates or questions ahead of the Budget?

Mr. Speaker: My understanding is that there are conventions regarding Ministers and the lead-up to the Budget. They are not rules of the House but they are perfectly understandable conventions on matters that may have an influence on the Budget. All I can say to the hon. Gentleman is this: I was present and I am not responsible for the Minister's reply, but I have had enough experience in the House to know that that is the type of reply that we get in the week before the Budget.

Russell Brown: On a point of order, of which I have given you prior notice Mr Speaker. Regrettably, like many others, I ask for your guidance and advice to hon. Members regarding parliamentary protocol. The hon. Member for Galloway and Upper Nithsdale (Mr. Duncan) has circulated literature in the town of Dumfries encouraging townspeople to bring issues to him, as an MP, including issues that could well be constituency casework. Surely, if individuals raise such matters with him, he would not be able to deal with them because of the conventions of the House, and therefore he would be misleading the public. I seek your guidance. Am I interpreting the rules correctly?

Mr. Speaker: I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving me notice of his concern. As I told the House last week, resolution of such disputes is best left to the good sense of the hon. Members concerned.

George Foulkes: What if they do not have any good sense?

Mr. Speaker: Order. All hon. Members have good sense. I understand that the particular newsletter to which the hon. Member for Dumfries (Mr. Brown) has drawn my attention was produced in the context of a prospective change of constituency boundaries that affects many constituencies in Scotland. I think that it would be unwise of me to intervene directly in such cases. I wish to make it clear, however, that regardless of proposals relating to parliamentary constituencies, the existing boundaries remain in force at least until the next general election. I therefore expect hon. Members to pay proper regard to the right of sitting constituency Members to represent their constituents. I add that, as the Member of Parliament for Glasgow, Springburn, I hold several surgeries per month. If any hon. Member wishes to do those surgeries, they are welcome.

Prevention of Homelessness Bill

Mohammad Sarwar: I beg to move,
	That leave be given to bring in a Bill to make provision about homelessness.
	We have come a long way since the first comprehensive legislation on homelessness in the United Kingdom was introduced in this House. The Housing (Homeless Persons) Act 1977 imposed substantial duties on all local authorities towards homeless people. There have been considerable developments in that area of law since 1977.
	Part VII of the Housing Act 1996, introduced by the Tories, significantly reduced the rights of homeless persons in England and Wales. It was a Labour Government who reversed the negative effects of the 1996 Act by introducing a Homelessness Bill, enacted as the Homelessness Act 2002. In Scotland, where housing is generally a devolved issue, the Labour-Liberal Executive introduced their own Homelessness Bill, which was enacted in 2003. The Scottish 2003 Act seeks to abolish homelessness by 2012. It will do that by abolishing the "priority need" test. There can be no doubt that the Labour Government and the Labour-led Scottish Executive have done more to eradicate homelessness in the past two years than the Conservative Government did in 18 years in power, but there is more that we can and must do to prevent homelessness in the United Kingdom.
	My Bill is relatively modest in its aims, but I sincerely believe that through these small and simple reforms we can prevent thousands of needless cases of homelessness. I hope that all hon. Members will agree that it is always better and less costly to prevent a problem from happening than to spend public money trying to pick up the pieces afterwards.
	In the case of homelessness, we are talking about broken lives. I believe that we can prevent a very large number of homelessness cases with the enactment of some very minor changes. At present, tenants and owner-occupiers can resist repossession proceedings, but clause 1 would introduce a general right for any residential occupier to apply to the court for a short suspended possession order. That would include members of the tenant's or owner-occupier's family or lodgers. The intention is to provide residential occupiers with the right to ask the court for a brief period to find reasonable alternative accommodation. By providing that brief period, we could avoid families having to sleep rough or in conditions unfit for human habitation.
	A recent trend in the UK has been for home owners to refinance their personal debt as consolidation loans secured on the value of their home. Such loans generally come with a much higher rate of interest than a principal mortgage. When family income drops, whether though illness or some other crisis, it is often the inability to meet consolidation loan payments that results in repossession and homelessness.
	Clause 2 would enable the courts to vary interest to no lower than the average rate for a United Kingdom mortgage. The power could be used to provide a period of respite and enable families to get back on their feet and meet their financial obligations. Importantly, that could enable people to retain their homes. The local law centre in my constituency reports that families facing repossession are often told that they have mortgage arrears of £1,000 or £2,000, when in fact up to a third of the arrears are administrative charges applied by the bank. Most mortgages contain indemnity clauses that force the debtor to pay the bank's legal expenses. Govan law centre reports many cases of people being told that they must pay £1,000 or more to the bank for the cost of being taking to court, even if they win the case. Clause 3 would enable the courts to waive some of those charges when it could mean the difference between someone being able to pay the arrears or facing homelessness.
	The final part of the Bill is aimed at some of the most vulnerable members of our society who are likely to face repossession and homelessness. When someone, for whatever reason, is in receipt of income support or jobseeker's allowance, they must wait 26 or 39 weeks before the Department for Work and Pensions will help to pay their mortgage interest. The fact that many families have to wait up to nine months often means that they will face repossession in the courts long before they get any help.
	Of course, if such families had not purchased their home and were still renting from a social landlord, they would not face eviction and would get immediate help from the local authority. Some have argued that the position is discriminatory against low-income home owners, and I am aware of one legal challenge to the relevant social security regulation in my constituency, under articles 8 and 14 of the European convention on human rights. I understand that the case is currently before the social security commissioners.
	Help with housing costs for home owners was substantially reduced by the Conservative Government in 1995. Since then, housing tenure has continued to shift generally towards home ownership. The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister reported in 2002 that only 19 per cent. of people in the United Kingdom rented their home from a social landlord, while 10 per cent. rented from a private landlord, and a massive 70 per cent. of all households were owner-occupiers, with 29 per cent. of those owning their home outright while 42 per cent. had a mortgage.
	Mortgage protection insurance is important, but it has not been the answer in practice. The simple fact is that many low and modestly paid families cannot afford it, and many policies are ineffective because of exclusion provisions.
	Clause 4 would enable the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to intervene in appropriate cases in order to prevent homelessness. The stark reality is that the failure to intervene and provide additional help will cost the state more money in the long run—more money to accommodate a family in expensive temporary accommodation under the Homelessness Act 2002; more than it costs to accommodate a family in social rented housing in receipt of full housing benefit.
	It is important to remember that many of the people facing repossession purchased their house because it cost less each month than renting it. That is why their eviction will be more costly to the state, which ends up paying a more expensive rent through housing benefit but does not provide any help for a cheaper mortgage. There is no policy logic in the current arrangements. I call on hon. Members to support the Bill and, by introducing some small legal reforms, help to make homelessness a thing of the past in the United Kingdom.
	Question put and agreed to.
	Bill ordered to be brought in by Mr. Mohammed Sarwar, Mr. Khalid Mahmood, Mrs. Alice Mahon, Angus Robertson, Jim Dobbin, Mr. Frank Roy, Sandra Osborne and Mrs. Helen Liddell.

Prevention of Homelessness

Mr. Sarwar accordingly presented a Bill to make provision about homelessness: And the same was read the First time; and ordered to be read a Second time on Friday 18 June, and to be printed [Bill 73].

DELEGATED LEGISLATION

Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 118(6)(Standing Committees on Delegated Legislation),

Social Security

That the draft Social Security (Basic Skills Training Pilot) Regulations 2004, which were laid before this House on 12th February, be approved.
	That the draft Social Security (Intensive Activity Period 50 to 59 Pilot) Regulations 2004, which were laid before this House on 12th February, be approved.
	That the draft Social Security (Intensive Activity Period 50 to 59 Pilot) (No. 2) Regulations 2004, which were laid before this House on 12th February, be approved.—[Margaret Moran.]
	Question agreed to.

EUROPEAN COMMUNITY DOCUMENTS

Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 119(9)(European Standing Committees),

Value Added Tax

That this House takes note of European Union document No. 13853/03, Commission Communication on the review and update of VAT strategy priorities; and welcomes both the progress made so far and the United Kingdom Government's continued aim to ensure a fair, responsive and robust VAT system based on unanimous agreement amongst Member States.—[Margaret Moran.]
	Question agreed to.

Orders of the Day

Traffic Management Bill

As amended in the Standing Committee, considered.

New Clause 11
	 — 
	Power to Inspect Blue Badges

'(1) Section 21 of the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970 (c. 44) (badges for display on motor vehicles used by disabled persons) is amended as follows.
	(2) In subsection (4B) after "a badge" there is inserted "purporting to be".
	(3) After subsection (4B) there is inserted—
	"(4BA) Where it appears to a constable or enforcement officer that there is displayed on any motor vehicle a badge purporting to be of a form prescribed under this section, he may require any person who—
	(a) is in the vehicle, or
	(b) appears to have been in, or to be about to get into, the vehicle,
	to produce the badge for inspection.
	(4BB) In subsection (4BA) "enforcement officer" means—
	(a) a traffic warden;
	(b) a civil enforcement officer (within the meaning of section 73 of the Traffic Management Act 2004);
	(c) a parking attendant (within the meaning of section 63A of the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984).
	(4BC) The power conferred on an enforcement officer by subsection (4BA) is exercisable only for purposes connected with the discharge of his functions in relation to a stationary vehicle.
	(4BD) A person who without reasonable excuse fails to produce a badge when required to do so under subsection (4BA) shall be guilty of an offence."
	(4) In subsection (4C) after "(4B)" there is inserted "or (4BD)".'.—[Mr. McNulty.]
	Brought up, and read the First time.

Tony McNulty: I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
	The new clause introduces a power for parking enforcement authorities to inspect disabled persons' parking badges, which we know as blue badges, to ensure that they are being used by those who are entitled to do so. My hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes, North-East (Brian White) tabled an amendment intended to cover this ground in Committee, where we undertook to consider how to introduce such a provision. I am delighted that we have been able to do so. Perhaps unusually, the measure had the acclamation of the entire Committee, which is why I am even more delighted, creature of consensus that I am, that we have been able to table this new clause.
	The new clause addresses an issue that has been of great concern not only to those responsible for parking controls, who obviously have a particular interest in this area; significantly, it has also been of concern to many organisations of disabled people. Badge holders themselves want the disabled persons parking scheme to work effectively for those who need the concessions that it provides for their day-to-day mobility. Abuse of the scheme by those who are not entitled to its concessions undermines its credibility, but such abuse can also have a direct and immediate impact on the mobility of disabled people. Car parking places reserved for bona fide badge holders could be blocked by those who display a blue badge but are not entitled to do so. As the House will understand, such abuse can virtually destroy the entire daily schedule of the disabled person concerned.
	The new clause will provide all those involved in the enforcement of parking controls with a power to require the driver or passenger—or anyone who they consider is returning to, or leaving, the car—to produce the badge for inspection. It restricts their exercising of that power to times when they are exercising their other functions. If a vehicle is displaying a parking badge but is not using the concessions that the scheme offers—for example, if it is parked in an area without parking restrictions—an enforcement officer will not be empowered to ask that the badge be produced for inspection. That is important to protect genuine badge holders from being targeted when they may have inadvertently left their badge on display.
	Those required to produce the badge include the driver, the passenger or anyone who is seen to be leaving, or who is about to return to, the vehicle. So even when the disabled badge holder is not in the vehicle but the concessions are clearly being used, an enforcement officer will still be able to ask the vehicle's occupant to produce the badge for inspection.
	In cases where someone unreasonably refuses to produce a badge for inspection, the clause creates an offence. Subject to conviction, a fine will be imposed not exceeding level 3, or £1,000. Guidance will be issued to enforcement officers and responsible authorities, advising them on the appropriate means of involving the police, so as to pursue a prosecution. We also intend that where a badge is not produced for inspection, the enforcement officer will treat that as a prima facie case of unlawful parking and issue a fixed penalty notice or a penalty charge, as appropriate. We do not need to provide for such circumstances in the Bill; the intention is that they will be covered in the guidance that we will produce for enforcement authorities and badge holders.

Greg Knight: A number of disabled people are concerned about what happens when the badge becomes partly obscured, perhaps because it moved while it was left in the vehicle; indeed, as a result of such an incident, many are given a ticket. If the badge is inspected and found to be in order and the disabled person is entitled to park where the car is parked, will the guidance make it clear that a ticket will not be issued if there is any possibility that such an incident might have been a mere accident?

Tony McNulty: I undertake to make sure that, if need be, the guidance will make that clear. When it is clear that a perfectly legitimate badge has been obscured, my authority—and doubtless many others—rescinds such parking notices. But if guidance is needed I shall certainly take this issue on board.
	On the subject of guidance, we will consult the relevant bodies representing local authorities, enforcement authorities and disability organisations, including our statutory advisers, the Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee. The guidance will be published before the power is brought into force. This is an important issue that DPTAC has brought to our attention before, and we said that we would seek to legislate at the earliest opportunity.
	I am pleased that the Bill allows us to legislate on this narrow enforcement issue, and I anticipate that it will enjoy the support of the whole House. I hope that the House agrees that the new clause addresses a fundamental gap in the enforcement of the blue badge scheme, and that Members will support the Government in its introduction. It seeks to restore the scheme's legitimacy without allowing abuses, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes, North-East (Brian White) and other members of the Committee for the way in which this issue was dealt in Committee. Although this measure is a small step in the wider scheme of things, in the context of making a substantive difference to the lives of disabled people, it has a significance far beyond that which we can grant it today. In that context of spirit, harmony and consensus, I commend the new clause to the House and hope to receive the House's acclamation for it, if not for myself.

Christopher Chope: We welcome the new clause; indeed, in Committee we supported the previous new clause—new clause 23—when it was discussed. However, I have a couple of questions for the Minister. He mentions the recommendations of the Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee, of which the provision before us is a key example. Another issue of equal concern is when the Government will legislate to allow the issuing of blue badges for children aged under two who require the transporting of bulky medical equipment. That is a key issue—albeit for a small group of people—and I should be interested to know when the Minister will legislate on that recommendation.
	Secondly, what happens when a person is asked to produce a badge for inspection by a traffic warden, civil enforcement officer or parking attendant, rather than a police officer, and the person of whom the request is made refuses to comply with it? According to the Minister's press release, such officials will have the power to inspect, but surely that is dependent on consent being given to inspection in the first place. How will it be possible to identify a person who refuses to allow the badge to be inspected, and what procedures for enforcement and penalties will flow from such a refusal?

Ross Cranston: I am very pleased that the Government have accepted this recommendation, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes, North-East (Brian White) on introducing this new clause in Committee. I declare an interest as the honorary president of the Blue Badge Network, which is based in Dudley town centre. As my hon. Friend the Minister said, the validity and credibility of the blue badge system, which is so important to disabled people, needs to be reinforced. As he rightly said, DPTAC made 47 recommendations, of which this is one. The fact that the police and enforcement officers will be able to call on those thought to be using such vehicles to produce badges for inspection is a very welcome move.
	That, however, is only part of the jigsaw, and I should like my hon. Friend the Minister to say when the guidance will take effect. The DPTAC report rightly points out that powers already exist in respect of the illegal use of badges, and that penalty notices can already be issued to badge holders parked illegally on the street, and to vehicle owners parked in spaces designated for badge holders. However, enforcement is absolutely crucial, and as the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) said, we should consider the important issue of children aged under two. Some indication as to when the guidance will be introduced would be very welcome.
	Unfortunately, there seems to be widespread fraudulent use of badges. According to one estimate, there are some 700,000 fraudulent abuses of the badge system. The chief superintendent of the Dudley, North operational command unit says that the number of badges, and the number of abuses of badges, are increasing at an alarming rate, so enforcement is absolutely crucial. An assurance from my hon. Friend the Minister on the implementation of the guidance would also be very welcome.

John Thurso: I, too, am pleased to welcome the new clause, which allows for the inspection of blue badges. It will be greeted warmly by all those who hold blue badges and will make a considerable difference to their lives, enabling them to avoid the frustration they often feel at being unable to use the parking spaces provided for them. It also has the benefit of making the law in England and Wales consistent with that in Scotland, which already benefits from such regulations. We supported the provision in Committee and I am pleased to confirm that we will support it today.

Brian White: As the Minister said, I moved a similar amendment in Committee, and other hon. Members have already mentioned several of the points that I intended to raise. However, it is important for the Government to introduce the guidance as quickly as possible. I am sure that my hon. Friend will seek to do so, but it would be helpful if we had some indication of how quickly it is likely to happen.
	Local authorities and the police already have a wide range of powers, and the disabled community will welcome the additional powers of inspection. Just yesterday I exchanged e-mails with one of my regular correspondents, Clive Bailey, who describes himself as a rebellious disabled member of the community. He pointed out the various problems that arise when people misuse parking bays. The power to inspect will make a major difference to the lives of people like him.
	As my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Dudley, North (Ross Cranston) pointed out, there is further work to do on other elements of the blue badge scheme, and I seek the Minister's assurance that the Bill will be the vehicle through which the Government will seek to make the necessary additional changes to improve the blue badge scheme—the extension to under-twos, for example. The Bill is welcome and I congratulate the Minister on following up my original amendment.

John Redwood: To complete the harmony of the occasion, I, too, welcome the Government new clause, and I also urge the Minister to produce carefully worded and timely guidance and advice. The guidance needs to be tough in some parts and kind in others. The House would surely agree with me that we should be tough on the low sort of life that tries to cheat on the use of these badges. It is particularly low and dirty to try to gain a badge on false pretences or to seek to use a vehicle carrying a badge when the person using that vehicle is not disabled and is not transporting a disabled person with him. We can all agree on that, and I hope that the guidelines will be tough on such people and that the maximum penalties will be imposed where it has been clearly established that the person fraudulently obtained a badge or fraudulently used a legitimate badge for another user or driver.
	I also agree with the important point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Mr. Knight) about dealing with disabled people themselves. There will be times when the authorities will challenge a disabled person in order to check up on legitimate use or concerning the appearance of the badge. In those cases, I hope that it will be done kindly and carefully with the assumption that what really matters is the fact that the proper person was trying to use the facility in the correct way. If some mistakes in how or whether a badge is displayed are made, we should not take a dim view if the right person was seeking to use it for the right purposes.
	Anyone who has suffered from temporary disabilities—broken limbs or other accidents—has just a small insight into what it must be like to have to live with even bigger hazards all one's life. We must all have enormous sympathy for such people and I hope that the measure that we are debating today will not make their lives more difficult. I do not want them to be hectored by the authorities trying to enforce the regulations against other people.

Tony McNulty: I thank hon. Members for their kind words and their welcome for the new clause. I should like to deal with some of the points that were raised.
	It was right to point out that the provision by no means exhausts all the DPTAC recommendations, and we are still reflecting on how best to deal with other outstanding matters. There are many different ways of proceeding. My hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes, North-East (Brian White) alluded to primary legislation, but there may be other vehicles for achieving what may appear to be only minor changes, which can be enormously important for people with disabilities. For example, we could attempt to rid the legislation of the overladen value judgment in the term "institution", in preference for "organisation". It is beyond the scope of this particular Bill, but it would also be good if we could implement a degree of reciprocity across the EU—if I may say that without provoking the current consensus—and a degree of mutual recognition of the system.
	The eligibility for the scheme of children under two could be the subject of secondary legislation. We have accepted DPTAC's recommendation to extend the scheme to certain groups of children under two—not least those who constantly require bulky or life-sustaining equipment to be carried around. Draft regulations are being prepared in that regard and we will consult on them later this year—as early as we possibly can. More generally, we are seeking to issue guidance for consultation at the earliest possible juncture. We want to reach a stage where enforcement officers and disabled badge holders are able to understand the full breadth of the guidance before the new powers are introduced. Assuming that the Bill receives royal assent we hope to introduce the powers at the earliest opportunity.
	The hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) raised an important point about enforcement officers and interplay with the police. We shall seek to ensure that enforcement officers and the responsible authorities advise on the most appropriate means of involving the police in order to pursue a prosecution. The interface with the police is highly important and we want the guidance to make clear, after consultation with the enforcement authorities and the relevant police authorities, the system that will prevail to achieve that. I repeat my undertaking to try to ensure that any guidance should make it clear that, where the badge of an entirely legitimate badge holder has somehow been obscured, the provisions can be revoked.
	There are other dimensions of the scheme that we need to reflect on further. We are examining the feasibility of establishing a national database of badge holders, specifying precisely who is entitled to use a badge throughout the country. We shall do some further research on that during the next couple of months. In the longer term, the advent and development of smartcard technology might provide an appropriate way to proceed.

Brian White: On that point, does my hon. Friend agree that the role of carers is crucial?

Tony McNulty: The eligibility of carers and of people with a clear temporary but debilitating disability—the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) referred to them—will require further examination in some detail. Both in the House and beyond, people have broadly welcomed the provisions. The Bill provides a substantive advance, which should be made, but I fully accept that DPTAC's recommendations and a range of other suggestions show that there is further to go before the blue badge scheme will be fully operative in the way we all want. Abuses certainly have a profound impact.

Christopher Chope: In the press release issued today, the Minister says police and parking enforcement officers
	"would have new powers to inspect blue badges",
	but my understanding is that the new clause will confer powers to ask to inspect. It does not give the enforcement officer the power to put his hand inside the car and seize the blue badge. If my interpretation is correct, will the Minister ensure that his press release is amended accordingly?

Tony McNulty: I do not think I will—not least because it has gone! The release states that seeking the leave of people to inspect is the start of the process. The other end of it, assuming that co-operation is not forthcoming, is, as I have said, a prima facie case of abuse or contravention of the parking rules. In the context of both aspects, calling it a right to inspect is perfectly valid.

Ross Cranston: It may help the House to note that proposed new subsection (4BD) states:
	"A person who without reasonable excuse fails to produce a badge when required to do . . . shall be guilty of an offence."
	I think that the press release is therefore accurate, and that there is no need to try to retract it.

Tony McNulty: My hon. and learned Friend has said in elegant legal terms what I was clumsily trying to express in my own way. I think we will leave the press release as it is.
	The right hon. Member for Wokingham spoke about the balance between cruelty and kindness, and called for a degree of flexibility in the guidance so that we focus on the people who transgress. Abuse in this area needs to be regarded as almost as taboo as transgressions such as drink driving. That is absolutely abhorred across the piece now, but only 10 or 20 years ago it was regarded as a bit of laugh. If a person got away with it, that was fine. It is not an overstatement to say that abuse of the blue badge scheme is an outright abuse of the civil rights and liberties of legitimate badge holders. If such people cannot park where they are lawfully entitled to, that can have a profound effect on their entire day.
	With the caveat that there is still a way to go on this matter, in the sense that there are more improvements to be made through the incorporation of recommendations from DPTAC and other bodies, I commend the new clause to the House.
	Question put and agreed to.
	Clause read a Second time, and added to the Bill.

New Clause 1
	 — 
	Civil Enforcement of Traffic Contraventions (Guidance)

'(1) The appropriate national authority may issue guidance to any local authority undertaking civil enforcement powers under Part 6 of this Act or the London Local Authorities and Transport for London Act 2003 about any matter relating to the exercise by it of any power to impose civil penalties for road traffic contraventions.
	(2) In exercising their powers of civil enforcement of traffic conventions a local authority shall have regard to any guidance under this section.'.—[Mr. Chope.]
	Brought up, and read the First time.

Christopher Chope: I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
	When the Minister introduced Government new clause 11, he made a slip of the tongue and talked about persecution. This new clause deals with persecution and how to prevent it. It is a plea for common sense, proportionality and reasonableness in the use of civil enforcement powers against motorists. It is a continuation of the Opposition's fight-back campaign on behalf of middle Britain. Motorists and other honest, decent and law-abiding road users are being persecuted and oppressed by unreasonable men and women in uniforms. The persecution is often carried out at the behest of local authority employers, out of greed or hatred of cars and those who drive them.
	In Standing Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Mr. Knight) drew attention to a headline in a Hampstead local newspaper earlier this year—"Traffic Warden Boss Admits He Hates Motorists". The newspaper sent a journalist, operating under cover, for a discussion with the person in charge of the traffic warden service. That person freely admitted that he hated all motorists, and would do all that he could to get at them. It is always important to consider whether a motive is involved, and there is clearly a motive in this case. That is why the Government must act on the matter.
	There was a long and lively debate on the morning of 5 February about the enforcement civil penalties for road traffic contraventions. Many examples were given to illustrate how unreasonable some civil enforcement can be. I shall not repeat them all, but earlier this year Nadhim Zahawi, the managing director of the YouGov organisation, was involved in an accident in which his scooter was wrecked. As he was lifted into an ambulance, a £100 ticket was put on his scooter. That was thought to be reasonable.
	Another example occurred in the snowy weather at the end of January and the beginning of February. A local authority placed fine notices on cars that had been abandoned because of the snow. That was also regarded as perfectly reasonable behaviour.
	Both those examples illustrate unreasonable persecution. The new clause would enable the Minister to protect motorists from the excesses of enforcement officers, whom my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire called
	"regulation-ridden, form-filling, pen-pushing nincompoops."—[Official Report, Standing Committee A, 5 February 2004; c. 260.]
	The hon. Member for City of York (Hugh Bayley) called them "over-zealous". The Minister said:
	"In general, it is reasonable to ask those who enforce parking regulations to use good sense. I believe that in most cases they do: clearly, in some cases, they do not, and we all know of examples. We should encourage local authorities to promote good practice among those who enforce the regulations. For the police, that is generally the case. A police officer will use discretion and good sense, and a little bit of discretion and good sense is needed in enforcing some of the other regulations as well."—[Official Report, Standing Committee A, 5 February 2004; c. 266.]

John Redwood: I am swayed by my hon. Friend's sensible arguments so far. New clause 1 states that local authorities "shall have regard" to guidance, but will he say what penalty or persuasion should be used to ensure that they follow any sensible guidance that is issued?

Christopher Chope: What I have in mind is that any statutory guidance could be taken into account by the adjudicator if an appeal is made. At present, the adjudicator must apply the letter of the law. He cannot allow the discretion that would have been exercised by a sensible police officer or traffic enforcement officer to be imposed on the tribunal. However, statutory guidance would allow adjudicators to take that into account. As a result, motorists would be protected from over-zealous enforcement.
	The Minister, in the passage that I quoted, seemed to accept our point that civil enforcement officers do not always exercise the common sense, proportionality and reasonableness that we have come to expect from the police. He said that he was keen to encourage local authorities to promote good practice. The voluntary guidance published in 1995 pursuant to powers contained in the Road Traffic Act 1991 is non-statutory. It is apparent that some local authorities have little, if any, regard for it. The new clause would put that non-statutory guidance on a statutory footing.
	The matter is even more important because of the proposals in the Bill to extend the civil enforcement regime to cover moving traffic offences. Some such enforcement is already beginning in London on an experimental basis, but the practice will become much more widespread nationally. That raises the need for statutory guidance.
	The Automobile Association has said:
	"The civil enforcement of parking and traffic offences will be discredited if motorists come to regard it as a revenue gathering exercise rather than a road safety and traffic management issue."
	The British Parking Association, in a letter to the Minister dated 1 March, admitted that allegations that some penalty charge notices had been issued improperly were correct. The letter stated:
	"At present enforcement relies on either the placing of a ticket on a stationary vehicle, handing the ticket to the driver of a stationary vehicle or on the corroborating evidence of a camera. We are concerned that with the advent of civil enforcement for moving traffic offences the uncorroborated evidence of a single enforcement officer will not be considered as adequate or safe by a large proportion of the public. In effect a driver will receive a penalty by post, some time after the alleged offence with no evidence other than the word of a single enforcement officer . . . and very little chance of being able to question or challenge the alleged offence coherently."
	The BPA's interest is almost the other way in this matter, but it recognises that some local authorities behave unreasonably when it comes to civil enforcement, and that the Bill's powers in respect of moving traffic offences will cause an even bigger rebellion among the motoring public.
	I hope that the Minister accepts that, at the very least, there needs to be statutory guidance to cover moving traffic offences, where the civil penalty cannot be served at the time of an offence and where reliance is placed on the uncorroborated evidence of a single traffic enforcement officer.
	The Minister accepts that where traffic offences are decriminalised and the courts are no longer involved, it is necessary to ensure that those aggrieved by the imposition of the penalty charge have recourse to an independent and impartial tribunal. Such a system was set up under section 73 of the Road Traffic Act 1991. Unfortunately, the tribunals do not have the discretion to examine issues of reasonableness and proportionality, despite their being referred to expressly in local authority circular 1/95.
	Page 38, paragraph 7.6 of the circular states:
	"Local authorities should ensure that all parking attendants, including supervisors and managers, having the training necessary to provide accurate, fair and consistent enforcement. This requirement applies whether the parking attendants are employed by the local authority or by a contractor."
	Paragraph 7.9 states that training should include
	"The authority's policy for dealing with 'mitigating circumstances' and other matters which require judgment to be exercised (eg. the motorist claiming to be going for change when the PCN is issued; nearest pay-and-display machine out of order, but another machine is close by; claim that meter out of order when PCN issued; motorist claims that voucher, permit etc. was valid when attendant considers it was not; explanatory note left in vehicle".
	Common sense and good judgment should be exercised on those issues, but there are currently far too many occasions on which judgment is manifestly not being exercised, and motorists are suffering as a result.
	On wheel-clamping, paragraph 8.16 of the circular states:
	"Local authorities undertaking wheelclamping should devise guidelines for when clamping may be carried out . . . It is important the guidelines can command public support by making the level of enforcement proportionate to the seriousness of the contravention. Wheelclamping may be brought into disrepute if a local authority permits it for what the public may regard as relatively unimportant contraventions."
	Vehicle removals are another contentious area, and paragraph 8.28 of the circular states:
	"Removals should not be carried out in an ad hoc fashion . . . As with wheelclamping, it is important to ensure that vehicle removals are only undertaken where the seriousness of the contravention warrants this level of enforcement. Inappropriate use of removals may bring an authority's enforcement activities into disrepute."
	The problem is that none of that worthy advice from the Government carries any weight with the adjudicator if a local authority chooses to use its enforcement powers in an arbitrary, inflexible and oppressive way.
	To put the matter in context, the latest figures show that more than 12,000 parking and bus lane appeals were received in the last three months of last year in London. More than 3,000 of those appeals were allowed, and in 3,266 cases the enforcement authority did not even bother to contest the appeal, resulting in an overall appeal success rate of 57 per cent.—moving traffic offences form a significant and growing part of that total. Most successful appeals and appeals that were not pursued by the enforcement authority should have been rejected at the informal representations stage. That aspect of the process is not working effectively.
	Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of motorists cannot be bothered to go through that long process when they know that there is an inflexible law with minimum discretion for the adjudicator in examining the actual facts of the case, so they pay up regardless but under protest. If we had statutory guidance, which new clause 1 seeks, that would be in the past, and we would also be able to deal with the problem of those local authorities—it has been drawn to my attention that Somerset, which is under Liberal Democrat control, is one such authority—that have a specific policy to incentivise traffic enforcement officers to go out and maximise revenue to the detriment of the travelling public.

John Mann: I have listened to the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) with incredulity given his references to the debate in Committee on 5 February in which it would be reasonable to say that I played a prominent part. He is so keen to pursue his long-held ideology of privatising everything and attacking the public sector at all times that one fears that he may have privatised his brain and that the shareholders have just taken a dividend. The debate on 5 February covered not only the public sector but the private sector.
	The Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Mr. Jamieson) issued a letter that specifically refers the 5 February debate, in which I pointed out the difference between private sector operators of car parks and public sector operators of car parks and that private sector operators of public car parks are anomalous. I received the Minister's letter yesterday, which is rather late in the day, and it does nothing to address that anomaly—indeed, it excuses it.
	The Minister is highly capable, competent and articulate, and he should know not to rely on information provided by the Department for Transport. He will recall that the Department managed to introduce road humps that failed to take account of where cars are positioned on the road, which were a disaster and unpopular across the country. The same point applies to the information that the Department has provided on civil and criminal enforcement, and the Minister's letter defends the existing legislation and the anomaly within it. An individual fined by a private operator of a private car park can go to a civil court and have their day in court. If a local authority is involved, an individual has the potential remedy of the parking adjudicator. But if a private operator of a local authority car park is involved, an individual can go to neither one nor the other and is therefore criminalised by the case being taken to the magistrates court.
	The Minister's letter and new clause 1 both fail to address this point: a private operator with a profit maximisation outlook, which is reasonable if one runs a private company, can put the threat of going to a criminal court to the motorist. The motorist faced with the prospect of going to a criminal court will obviously be intimidated by the potential for criminal proceedings and a criminal record. The evidence from many cases in Bawtry car park, which adjoins my constituency, is that individuals cave in although their tickets should not have been given in the first place. New clause 1 must therefore incorporate civil enforcement if it is to be of any use to Parliament, motorists and the people of Britain.
	Private operators are running public car parks as cash cows. They are raking in 100 per cent. of the money—as at Bawtry car park—and that must be addressed. The Minister, through his civil servants, has attempted to address the anomaly in the legislation, but failed once again to address the anomaly in the law, which was demonstrated in Doncaster magistrates court. Such cases are covered by section 112 of the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984, which defines local authorities as
	"a county council . . . a district council, a London borough council and the Common Council of the City of London."
	Therefore, neither a parish council nor the private operator of a parish council car park can take people to court. That contradicts the letter that the Minister sent to all members of the Committee—he is wrong and his civil servants are wrong. The issue is small because not many parish councils are stupid enough, anti-motorist enough or greedy enough to try to skin the motorist of money via a private operator. With the publicity that the parish council has received, I cannot imagine that there will be a queue—certainly in my area—of parish councils that wish to skin the motorist in such an unprecedented, unprincipled and greedy way. However, the anomaly could also apply to car parks owned by a county or district council or a unitary authority. Therefore, the issue must be addressed and my hon. Friend the Minister needs to put his mind to it. If the Government are to be on the side of the motorist, we cannot allow the private operators of public sector car parks to skin the motorist by using the threat of criminal proceedings. That has happened time and again, as proved by the evidence that I have provided to his Department.
	One should never rely on evidence provided by a cursory examination by a local authority that—as the hon. Member for Christchurch pointed out—may also be on the make by skinning the motorist. For example, local authorities claim that car parking machines across the country are the same. They do not know that, because they did not configure the machines. If the civil servants had read the report of the debate on 5 February they would have seen from Hansard that the manufacturer of the machines, Metric, admits that the tolerance on the machines can be configured by the owner. When configuring a machine, the margins of tolerance are significant enough to determine whether, for example, a 20p piece registers. It is a longstanding issue. Years ago, people who had been abroad could stick old French francs in chocolate machines in place of a shilling to fiddle the chocolate manufacturers. Of course, I would never have dreamed of doing such a thing myself, but we have all heard the stories about such practices.
	The question of the tolerance of the machines is fundamental. The owner of a machine can fiddle the tolerance so that a 20p piece stays in the machine but does not register, and the motorist might not notice that. How would the motorist then know that the money that they had paid honestly for car parking had not been registered by the machine? That might lead to the absurdity of a fine. That is a major issue, and I suspect that the scandal of Bawtry car park has been silently replicated across the country and that other hon. Members will be inundated with demands for action if my hon. Friend the Minister does not take action now.
	In exposing the weakness in the new clause, with its ideology of privatisation, I have put before my hon. Friend the weakness of the arguments that his civil servants have provided for him. I trust that he will wish to reconsider that advice, put the record straight and allow the motorist to win, not the fleecer of the motorist's pocket.

John Redwood: It is a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) after that powerful speech, and I have much sympathy with his condemnation of rapacious car park managers of all kinds. He may be on to something and it is a pity that Ministers have not taken his arguments more seriously so far. It was a little unfair to criticise my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope), because the new clause tries to deal with a wider point about ensuring that sensible guidance is issued to local authorities that may be rapacious enough to see these measures against the motorist as an opportunity to raise revenue rather than to run a disciplined show.
	The clauses in question include clause 70, which shows that we are talking about a wide range of contraventions by the motorist. The list includes:
	"parking contraventions . . . bus lane contraventions . . . London lorry ban contraventions . . . moving traffic contraventions".
	It was the inclusion of the latter group that worried my hon. Friends who framed the new clause. The Opposition are concerned by the way in which the motorist has been targeted by some authorities, national and local, as the object of fines for minor infringements of ill-judged regulations. Motorists agree that they are ill judged, and that is why the motorists fall foul of them. I am pleased that my hon. Friends have produced a proposal so that a sensible Secretary of State could offer guidance to local authorities and discipline or control any local authority that might wish to use sensible measures for orderly policing of traffic as a means of raising revenue by exploiting motorists in distress.
	I shall not bore the House with many examples, but it is important to consider one or two cases of inadvertent or unavoidable infringements for which a motorist could be hounded if sensible guidance is not offered. One example is bus lane contraventions. Most of the time, it is right that a motorist should observe the restriction on his use of a bus lane. If the bus lane is in operation, whether or not any buses are using it, the motorist knows that he must keep outside the bus lane on what remains of the highway. Let us suppose something happens just ahead of the motorist—an accident, or a motorcycle or cycle pulling out—so that it is rational and necessary for the motorist to take evasive action by moving his vehicle temporarily into the bus lane to avoid a worse problem such as a collision or worsened congestion. That is a judgment that a motorist has to make in a split second. It may be that, before the enforcement authorities intervene, the temporary problem that caused the motorist to move into the bus lane has cleared or is not immediately apparent to the enforcement officers who were not on the scene at the time. The motorist may then be prosecuted, but it is important that authorities dealing with such infringements are sensible about what might have happened. In the event of prosecution, there needs to be a proper procedure to allow the motorist to state his case, and for that to be taken seriously. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch has done us a service by drawing attention to such issues.
	The same is true of parking. On occasion, a motorist may identify a free parking space only to discover that the parking machines in the vicinity are full of coins and not operating or have broken down. Is it really the case that the motorist has to feel that he cannot park there at all, even though it is a lawful parking slot in normal circumstances, because the authorities have been unable to collect the money or maintain the machine to an appropriate standard? I would hope that a plea in mitigation would be available, so that the motorist could get off if he had tried to pay and had genuinely been unable to do so, especially in cases where he had put a note on the windscreen of the car, explaining that he had no wish to defraud or deprive the authorities of their money but that there was no one around to collect it and the machine that the authority had supplied could not take the money. I hope that such extenuating circumstances will lead to sensitive and sensible enforcement.
	Under the new clause, in the event that authorities tried to play Dick Turpin with the extensive powers to charge and fine, there would be an opportunity for a Minister to issue national guidance. I have only one worry about my hon. Friends' sensible proposal. I doubt whether Ministers are on the side of motorist and would wish to use the power sensibly if local authorities saw the Bill as a way to raise money from unsuspecting motorists or those unavoidably tempted into breaking a rule or regulation. I will not hold that against my hon. Friends, however. I would like to see them return to government as soon as possible, and it would be useful if the provision were included in the Bill so that it could be used by a sensible Minister, even if we cannot persuade current Ministers that there is a problem. I sometimes read in the press that Ministers have seen the light and recognised that most of their constituents—and they themselves—are occasionally motorists, but at other times they seem to go back into the mode of thinking that all motorists are wicked and should not use their cars.
	It gives me pleasure to support the new clause, and I hope that the Minister will find some words of comfort for the hon. Member for Bassetlaw, who needs a different kind of amendment to tackle the robber barons about whom he is rightly worried.

Greg Knight: I hope that I am not developing early signs of schizophrenia, but I have been puzzling since our debate started about why, on the amendment paper, I am referred to as "Gregory" next to the new clauses to which I have put my name and "Greg" next to the amendments. Perhaps someone could enlighten me about that before we conclude our proceedings.
	I support new clause 1. There is a need for a code of practice, compliance with which should be compulsory—it should be a mandatory code. It is needed because widely varying practices are currently applied to decriminalised parking enforcement contracts from one council to another. Existing guidance from the Department, which I understand is issued under circular 1/95, is not proving to be as helpful as many Conservative Members had hoped. The circular is largely ignored by several local authorities, and I am told that some councils are not even aware of its existence.
	In case after case, the monetary gain from parking penalties is too much of a temptation for many councils, and they prefer to maximise their revenue at the expense of fairness and justice. I was listening to a local radio station in my car as I drove south down the M1 on my way to the House yesterday. I was astonished to hear someone from Leicester city council saying that the council had to increase the parking charges in the city of Leicester by far more than the rate of inflation because its revenue from the issuing of parking tickets had dropped. The radio interviewer seemed rather baffled as to why the council wished to penalise law-abiding motorists who parked in parking bays and paid their fees because the rate of revenue gained from those who ignored the law had fallen. The council has given the game away. Many local authorities introduce such measures as a purely revenue-raising exercise.
	A mandatory code of practice would require local authorities to ensure that enforcement standards were uniform throughout the country. I believe that it would reduce the number of appeals made on tickets issued in borderline circumstances. As my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) said, the adjudication service would have clear instructions as to what was, and what was not, reasonable.
	I would also hope that a code of practice would completely remove some of the dubious practices that currently exist in some parts of the country, and I wish to inform the House of several examples of such practices that have been brought to my attention since the Bill started its parliamentary progress. First, in some areas, a penalty charge notice is issued within one or two minutes of the expiry of the time purchased. Secondly, vehicles are sometimes clamped before the statutory 15 minutes has expired. I believe that 15 minutes is far too short a time anyway, because clamping adds to the delay suffered by the motorist and the inconvenience caused. It also puts a further £60 or so on top of what is already an extremely high charge.
	Thirdly, vehicles are towed away from a parking bay within the first hour of overstay even though they clearly cannot be causing an obstruction because they are in a parking bay. The power to tow vehicles from parking bays should not exist unless it is clear from the effluxion of time that a vehicle has been abandoned. Fourthly, I am told that in some local authorities, authorised removal vehicles cruise around looking for offending vehicles. The Minister should condemn that practice because although it contravenes his Department's guidance, it happens on the streets of some of our cities.
	Fifthly, traffic wardens do not wait to satisfy themselves of whether a vehicle is being loaded or unloaded. A case was recently brought to my attention in which a solicitor was visiting his in-laws and unloading a piece of furniture from his car. The solicitor was amazed to observe from the house window a traffic warden who approached the vehicle and started to write a ticket without delay. With the presence of mind that one would expect from a member of the legal profession, he took out a video camera and videoed the incident. When the local authority refused to withdraw the ticket, he took the matter all the way to court and won his case by producing evidence that the traffic warden had not satisfied himself that the vehicle was being unloaded.
	The sixth complaint that has been drawn to my attention is about cases in which a penalty charge notice is issued for a so-called out-of-parking-bay offence even though the vehicle extends just over the bay lines. Does the Minister approve of such behaviour and, if not, will he tell us what he intends to do to bring about an end to the practices? If new clause 1 were to become law, it would cope with all the grey areas that I mentioned.

John Redwood: I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for his good list. Has he come across the practice in some London boroughs of having one-armed-bandit parking ticket machines that do not tell people how much money they must put in to trigger extra minutes? People put in a reasonable amount yet discover that they have bought no extra time at all and that even more must be put in. There are machines that swallow money for time outside the hours in which parking restrictions are imposed, but people are not warned of that or given a refund. There are also machines that offer no change. Are not all those things akin to theft?

Greg Knight: I agree with my right hon. Friend. Proper signing and notices are essential so that motorists know what is required of them. One wonders why the notices are inadequate. Perhaps that is deliberate—as I think he and I suspect—so that more revenue may be raised from the motorist.
	We often hear that we are a tolerant society with a fair system of justice, but those practices are a blot on our otherwise well-earned reputation for fairness. They are driven by the greed of local authorities, not by justice. I frankly find them offensive because they are a means of raising money from those members of society who are in the main law-abiding, yet are identified by local authorities as a soft touch.
	What makes matters worse is the fact that our fines and parking charges in general are already among the highest in the world. If my right hon. and hon. Friends will forgive me, I shall commit heresy by citing figures in euros. I think that the House will find the figures interesting. In Vienna, the maximum parking fee is Euros0.87 per hour. In Brussels, the maximum parking fee is Euros0.50 per hour, and in Barcelona, the maximum fee is Euros1.20 per hour. In Amsterdam, the maximum fee is Euros2.50 per hour, and in Paris, which is the nearest of our European partners' capital cities to this island, the maximum parking fee is Euros3 per hour. However, here in the UK, in London, the maximum parking fee is Euros8 per hour. I do not regard that as justice. The situation is not equitable or fair, and the Minister should examine it.
	One can add to that the fact that most of our European Union partners impose fairly modest fines for breaches of parking regulations. Fines for parking offences ranging from Euros25 to Euros50 are the norm throughout the EU. However, in the UK, fines—perhaps I should call them stealth-tax fines—of between Euros100 and Euros130 are imposed.
	Looking at these figures, the House can see how great is the injustice on the poor, long-suffering British motorist.
	A report in The Times on 7 March revealed that
	"wardens in Scotland's two biggest cities distributed 500,000 tickets last year. Glasgow city council raised £6.6m in fines while Edinburgh collected £7.1m—a rise of 40% on the previous year."
	It went on:
	"Wardens in Edinburgh, nicknamed the 'blue meanies', have issued tickets to disabled drivers, police cars, ambulances and a hearse. Drivers in Glasgow have been ticketed close to midnight and others have been hit with fines for parking late at night in council car parks."
	The report also reveals that, although 500,000 tickets were issued in Glasgow and Edinburgh, the police are responsible for issuing tickets outside those cities, and they issued only 157,000 tickets. That indicates that the police are operating as we would expect—in a quasi-judicial way—in issuing tickets when they feel that that is fair, yet in some, not all, decriminalised areas where wardens operate, those wardens see this as a money-making exercise.
	The new clause is an attempt to stamp out those indefensible injustices, over which the Government continue to preside. Let the Minister accept the new clause, and if he resists it let him explain to the House how he intends to guarantee to the motoring public fairness and equity in the operation of our parking systems. The unfair brow-beating and money-grabbing persecution more suited to a banana republic than to the United Kingdom really must cease.

David Jamieson: I was interested in the remarks of the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope), who repeated a phrase that he used in Committee: he said that he was involved in the fight-back campaign for middle Britain. I can tell him that if the unlikely day comes when he gets somewhere near to getting back into government, he will be doing as we are doing—fighting on behalf of the whole of Britain.
	We fully intend that guidance will be issued to local authorities undertaking civil enforcement of traffic contraventions. Part 6 provides for putting civil traffic enforcement by local authorities on a consistent national basis. All authorities, whether in London or outside, will be given the same powers. It is important that authorities that exercise those powers should do so as consistently as possible across the country, and that requires nationally applicable guidance.
	I am not sure that I would go as far as the right hon. Member for East Yorkshire (Mr. Knight), who I know to be a strong Europhile. I do not know whether those views are entirely shared by those around him. I do not want Euro-standards for fines or any matters to do with taxation, even though I am a luke-warm Europhile.

Greg Knight: I was not arguing for Euro-standards; I was making the point that where we are so far out of line with the rest of the civilised world, surely something must be wrong. Our fines and parking charges are too high.

David Jamieson: We are a long way out of line on road safety and on death and injury on the roads, and I would say that that is not wrong; it is right. We are right in the fines that we are imposing. It is also right that we make decisions about these matters, and I certainly do not want any Euro-standards. Perhaps the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) will come to the right hon. Gentleman's aid and make a strong, powerful case on behalf of Europe.

John Redwood: indicated dissent.

David Jamieson: There we are—there is already a split on the Tory Benches. It doesn't take long, does it?

John Mann: I thank my hon. Friend for giving way on the issue of Euro-standards. As he will be aware, I have driven cars and lorries commercially into many of the cities that were mentioned, and I assure him that the information provided by the right hon. Member for East Yorkshire (Mr. Knight) is wholly inaccurate regarding a number of the capital cities that he mentioned; for example, Brussels, Vienna and Paris.

David Jamieson: I thank my hon. Friend for that.
	The question is whether guidance needs to be put on a statutory basis, as new clause 1 seeks to provide. Sadly, we cannot accept the new clause as drafted, as it refers to the London Local Authorities and Transport for London Act 2003. The civil enforcement provisions of that Act will be repealed in due course by regulations to be made under the provisions of part 6 of this Bill. Also, I have to say that, although we know a good deal about civil enforcement of parking and bus lanes, in framing national guidance, we will in fact be learning from the practical experience gained by the pilots of enforcement of moving traffic contraventions to be undertaken in London under the powers in the 2003 Act.
	I have considered the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) in the debate and in the substantial correspondence that he sent to my Department, which I read with great care. It makes sense for local authorities to be able to contract out the day-to-day operation of their car parks where that represents best value. Where such contracts are entered into, it is of course the responsibility of the local authority to ensure that the appointed contractor acts in accordance with the authority's wishes.
	The case of Bawtry council car park is, perhaps, unusual. My hon. Friend made a point about the adjudicator. In the case of that particular car park and highways authority the area does not, as yet, have decriminalised parking, which means that the adjudicator is the magistrates court. One of the things that my hon. Friend was asking for is that the parish council should have to go to the highways authority to get permission to go ahead with prosecution. The right hon. Member for Wokingham, who is not usually one for talking up extra regulation, even for local authorities, supported my hon. Friend in that. The difficulty is that we could be providing something that all parish councils in similar circumstances would have to do, putting an extra burden of bureaucracy on them because of what I consider to be the specific and particular problems of the car park in my hon. Friend's area.
	I fully accept that there are difficulties in that car park; my hon. Friend articulated them with great strength and power today and in the Standing Committee. If he thinks that there are other places with similar problems—perhaps the right hon. Member for Wokingham, who came to his support, knows of some—I will be interested to hear about them.

John Mann: The point is that the parish council cannot go for decriminalised car park status, and if Doncaster council, as the highways authority, went for that status, the ambiguity would be even greater, because the parking adjudicator would be available for people parking in Doncaster car parks, but not those in the privatised Bawtry car park, precisely because it was privatised.

David Jamieson: I do not think that that is correct. I will take some advice on that, but it is for my hon. Friend to go to the authority in Doncaster to see whether it has any interest in taking up the option of decriminalised parking. The adjudicator would then, as my hon. Friend says, be available to people in Doncaster. As I understand it, however, it is the operation of the car park, rather than the car park itself, that is privatised. My hon. Friend will accept that if we made regulation on the basis of one car park, which affected all the other parish council authorities in the country, that would be somewhat unfortunate.
	I have listened to the debate with great care. Having listened to Members' oratory, I wish to sound an early conciliatory note. Whatever the defects in the drafting of the new clause, after careful consideration I have concluded that there is merit in putting civil enforcement guidance on a statutory basis. It would give the guidance greater force and make authorities more mindful of its content when carrying out enforcement activities. I therefore hope that the hon. Member for Christchurch will withdraw the new clause on the understanding that we will introduce a suitable amendment in another place, putting guidance to local authorities on civil enforcement of traffic contraventions on a statutory basis.

Christopher Chope: I am grateful for what the Minister has said. Could he be more precise about the stage at which he will table an amendment in another place?

David Jamieson: I have only just been persuaded by the hon. Gentleman's arguments, but when the Bill goes to another place we will consider how to table a new clause to meet the points raised in new clause 1.
	I hope that that is helpful. Notwithstanding his points about Europe, with which I did not agree, the right hon. Member for East Yorkshire expressed some genuine concerns, and we shall make sure that they are dealt with.

John Mann: I am horrified that the Minister has accepted a provision that worsens the double standards that apply to local authority car parks and privately operated local authority car parks. What advice would he give to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency which, in a letter to me this morning, said that copies of penalty notices have to be provided? I won my court action against Bawtry town council because the DVLA had agreed that penalty notices were inaccurate and had been issued illegally. What does the Minister intend to do to ensure that equally strong guidance is issued to private operators, not least because the DVLA is key—

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. That is a very lengthy intervention.

David Jamieson: Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.
	The guidance, in fact, will take into consideration most of my hon. Friend's points, but I will also look at the involvement of the DVLA.

Greg Knight: To hear a Minister admit that he listened to the debate and was convinced by it is very rare indeed, so I should like to place on record the fact that there is no gloating among Conservatives. Indeed, in our eyes, he has grown in stature.

David Jamieson: That is extremely kind of the right hon. Gentleman. In the seven years for which I have been in government it has not been uncommon for Ministers to listen—indeed, that occasionally happened before we came to office.
	I hope that my assurance has been helpful. A good case was made for the new clause, and I shall accept its substance for consideration in another place.

Christopher Chope: I am surprised but delighted by the Minister's approach. I hope one day to have a secretary who can type up my thoughts as quickly as the Minister's thoughts were typed up when, in responding to our debate, he changed his mind after he listened to our arguments. We decided, because of the strength of our arguments, to table our amendments well before the Bill's Report stage. The Minister could therefore have applied himself to the matter a little earlier, and tabled an appropriate Government amendment. However, we look forward to seeing the substance of the Government amendment in another place, and I hope that it will take into account the concerns expressed both in our debate and by parking adjudicators. Recognising that this is a victory in the motorist's fight back, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.
	Motion and clause, by leave, withdrawn.

New Clause 2
	 — 
	Permits issued under Part 3 (Fees)

'No fee in respect of any application for a permit or the issue of a permit under Part 3 of this Act shall be set at a level higher than that necessary to cover the administrative costs of—
	(a) responding to permit applications;
	(b) issuing permits; and
	(c) maintaining a register of permits.'.—[Mr. Chope.]
	Brought up, and read the First time.

Christopher Chope: I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

Madam Deputy Speaker: With this it will be convenient to discuss the following amendments: No. 10, in page 16, line 20, at end insert—
	'(2A) Permit regulations shall set out standard provisions which must be included in a permit scheme so as to ensure a reasonable level of consistency between permit schemes within the authority's area, and in particular to ensure that a single electronic noticing system may be used to implement permit schemes within the authority's area.'.
	No. 11, in page 16, line 40, at end insert—
	'(f) for or in connection with the obtaining of permits for works carried out by the highway authority, and/or the inclusion of works carried out by the highway authority in a register of permits.'.
	No. 12, in page 20, line 31, at end insert—
	'(3B) A street authority may not give a direction under this section in respect of works for which a permit under part 3 of the Traffic Management Act 2004 has been issued.".'.

Christopher Chope: I hope that the Government will be as accommodating of new clause 2 as they were of new clause 1.
	The provision deals with a stealth tax that is estimated to cost £1.2 billion a year or £55 per household per year. It is therefore quite high up the list of stealth taxes. To put it in context, while that figure is not as high as the pension stealth tax of £5 billion or £6 billion a year, it is greater than the total yield from the new charging regime that the Government propose to impose on higher education. Our debate is therefore significant, because if the Government accepted the new clause, they would be unable to use the permit scheme in part 3 as a new stealth tax.
	One of the most frustrating aspects of the Committee stage was the lack of clarity about the Government's intentions on the use of lane rental, penalties for roadworks that take longer than is reasonable and the introduction of a permit scheme, perhaps along the lines of the scheme used in New York. If the Bill remains unamended, the Government will have the power to use the permit scheme as a means of imposing charges on utilities for the mere occupation of the highway, irrespective of whether the occupation is necessary. The Transport Act 2000 introduced a lane rental scheme, which was piloted in Camden and Middlesbrough. Those lane rental pilots expire at the end of March and the Government consultants, Halcrow, will report on the outcome. It is already clear from their interim report, however, that the pilots have proved to be expensive and bureaucratic, and have not resulted in a reduction in the number and incidence of roadworks undertaken by utilities. New clause 2 would prevent the Government from using the permit scheme as a revenue-raising measure on a par with lane rental.
	In Committee, the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Harrow, East (Mr. McNulty) said:
	"the Bill is not about introducing permit schemes as a revenue-raising exercise."
	He went on to say:
	"We must ensure that there is sufficient ability to charge for the permits to pay for the scheme. However, it is not meant to be, and I do not think that it will be, a revenue-raising scam".—[Official Report, Standing Committee A, 29 January 2004; c. 163–65.]
	The hon. Gentleman went on to suggest that he was sympathetic to our aim of including in the Bill a restriction on the power of local authorities to use permit schemes as revenue-raising measures. That was the good news, but sadly the efforts of representatives from the National Joint Utilities Group, who spoke to officials from the Department behind the scenes about finding a form of words acceptable to the Government were met with stony silence—indeed, were strongly rebuffed.

Eric Forth: I am interested in my hon. Friend's analysis, but how does it accord with the view in many quarters that we should allow local authorities the maximum discretion in deciding what to do in their own area? Is there not an argument for saying that in this case, as in many others, local authorities should be allowed wide discretion in charging for permits, as they would be accountable to voters later?

Christopher Chope: My right hon. Friend makes a case for giving local authorities a great stealth tax power but, having been the leader of a local authority, I believe that it should be the responsibility of national Government and Parliament to set the parameters of local authorities' tax and revenue-raising powers. It is a great privilege for local authorities to be able to raise taxes through, for example, the council tax. Imposing charges for car parking or occupation of the road is one thing, but a scheme for raising more than £1 billion a year from the utilities and, effectively, the public is something else—[Interruption.] My right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) thinks that that is a good idea, and I look forward to hearing his arguments later. Speaking as someone who is concerned on behalf of ordinary householders whose utility bills are already of significant size and will go up further as a result of various measures introduced by the Government, I think householders throughout the country need another £55 added to their utility bills each year like they need a hole in the head. I am in favour of flushing out the Government's attitude to this stealth tax. If it means that I go down fighting on behalf of my constituents and other householders, but get some criticism from my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, so be it.

Andrew Miller: Is there not a flaw in the hon. Gentleman's argument? He has argued before that the utilities, particularly modern utilities such as broadband, are delivered in a way that disadvantages people in rural communities. Is it not the case that rural communities would not pay the alleged tax that he has invented, and the burden would fall entirely on urban dwellers?

Christopher Chope: I have not yet referred to any particular utilities or to broadband. The hon. Gentleman mentions the specific issue of broadband and telecoms infrastructure. As he knows, that is a sensitive issue, and some of the more remote communities may get access to broadband without the roads having to be dug up.

Andrew Miller: So will the hon. Gentleman concede that his earlier figure of £55 per household is wrong?

Christopher Chope: I will not concede that that is wrong. It is, inevitably, an average. The calculation is based on dividing the figure of £1.2 billion by the number of households, which gives a possible cost per household of £55 per annum to introduce the scheme that the Government have in mind. The hon. Gentleman identifies a difference between rural and urban areas, which means that in some areas the figure will be less than £55 and in others it will be much more than £55.

John Redwood: My hon. Friend has put his finger on a crucial point. Is this not part of a pattern? The Government came in with a utility windfall tax, went on to a pension tax, then to a telecoms tax—a swingeing £22 billion on our leading utilities at the cutting edge of the technological revolution—and now the Government are going on to another set of stealth taxes on utilities trying to improve the service to our constituents. I am entirely with my hon. Friend, and in disagreement with my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) who, on this rare occasion, has got it wrong.

Eric Forth: Wait and see. The House has not heard me yet.

Christopher Chope: Indeed, I have not heard my right hon. Friend's speech. I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) for his support.
	Looking at the matter in context, it is clear that the biggest burden will be in the water industry, which is carrying out a major investment programme. The industry estimates that the cost of the scheme that the Government have in mind would be in the region of £300 million a year. If the Government accept the new clause, we will know that they do not have a stealth tax in mind. I recently attended a Greater London authority meeting, which was not an experience I would wish on other hon. Members. I noticed how enthusiastic the Mayor of London is about getting his hands on new revenue from the permit regime.
	I shall speak briefly about the amendments included in the group. Amendment No. 10 seeks to avoid the administrative nightmare for utility companies of myriad different permit schemes operating across England and Wales. It would integrate an electronic noticing system within any permit scheme to further reduce the administrative overheads. The amendment is in line with the stated intentions of the Minister, who said in Committee:
	"The greater the standardisation that the group can achieve, the better"—[Official Report, Standing Committee A, 29 January 2004; c. 166.]
	The amendment would not prevent account being taken of local circumstances, but would ensure that differing local circumstances were taken into account in the application of a permit scheme, rather than in the scheme itself. A permit scheme needs to be flexible enough to take account of different road types and traffic conditions. Those are the key differentiating factors between local authorities. The amendment is supported by Transport for London, which states that it would prefer a single permit system to operate in London so that information could be easily shared and analysed and administrative burdens minimised.
	Amendment No. 11 introduces uniformity by ensuring that the local traffic authority would have to abide by the same conditions as apply to utilities. If permits are an effective way of meeting the overall objectives of reducing congestion caused by obstruction in the road, logic requires that highway authorities should be included. Clause 32(2)(a) states that the permit scheme may make provision as to the persons who require a permit, which does not rule out the highway authority needing a permit for its works. The amendment would make that explicit.
	Amendment No. 12 is designed to address the potential conflict between permit schemes and directions under section 56 of the New Roads and Street Works Act 1991. It is absurd to have different provisions in different Acts controlling the same set of circumstances. The amendment makes it clear that where a permit is granted, it will take precedence over section 56.
	In conclusion, the amendments are supported by the Transport Sub-Committee, which has expressed its grave scepticism about the entire permit scheme and its opposition to the lane rental scheme. It believes that the Government should develop a scheme, which we strongly support, for penalties where utilities take longer than is reasonable to carry out works on the highway. Introducing an additional stealth tax is the wrong way to proceed.

Brian White: I have considerable sympathy with the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) because the amendments reflect a number of issues that I raised in Committee, especially a permit scheme. I was interested in why he mentioned a stealth tax and the figure of 55 quid. That assumes that the utilities would be subsidising local authorities, it assumes all the costs but none of the savings, and it is a worst-case scenario. To present the situation as the hon. Gentleman did exaggerates points that are validly made.

Andrew Miller: Did my hon. Friend notice that the hon. Gentleman omitted the effect of the business rate, and told me in response to an intervention that the £22 billion income from the telecoms auction was this Government's stealth tax? As my hon. Friend knows, that was started by another Government.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I hope that in his mind the hon. Gentleman was addressing the Chair, rather than his hon. Friend.

Brian White: As my hon. Friend says, the 3G licence was in the Conservative party manifesto in 1997, on which the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) fought that election.

John Redwood: I was the shadow spokesman when the measure went through, and I opposed it on behalf of Her Majesty's loyal Opposition on the grounds that it would do great damage to the industry, which it did.

Brian White: That does not answer the point that the right hon. Gentleman fought an election on that policy, which was proposed by the Government whom he supported. He has a selective memory.
	The utilities have expressed concern about the way in which local authorities will operate the permit scheme. There is perceived unfairness in the local authorities' both operating and being subject to the permit scheme. I hope Ministers will discuss that with the utilities. There is also concern among utilities that additional costs will be passed to them and therefore to their customers, particularly in the telecoms industry. That industry is particularly fiercely competitive at the moment and there is not much scope for companies to absorb additional costs. In fact, most of them are fairly efficient. Telecoms works tend to be smaller in size and shorter in duration—many are completed in one day. On Second Reading, the Minister referred to the establishment of a working group to try to ensure that permit schemes take on board the needs and priorities of the economy as a whole. I urge him to consider any recommendations that come from that in relation to the operation of permit schemes.
	Most telecoms companies strive to connect customers in line with their requests. There is a danger that all schemes will be treated equally although they do not cause the same amount of damage. Some roadworks are minor and involve non-sensitive roads. Permit schemes must be flexible enough to ensure that different schemes are treated differently—otherwise, people's fears about the size and cost of bureaucracy may be realised.
	In response to my amendments in Committee, the Minister gave an assurance that permit schemes will be covered by regulations. I welcome that, but urge him to undertake full consultation before implementing the regulations, because the industry fears that that will not happen.
	The hon. Member for Christchurch talks about the need for a national permit scheme, or at least one that is consistent across the country. Can the regulations be drafted from the point of view of someone who has to fill in the forms? Many utilities fear that they will have to fill in forms for many different types of scheme. It is important to have not only local variations to adapt to local circumstances, but consistency nationally so that national companies are not faced with myriad different approaches.
	The new clause is unnecessary. This is not a stealth tax. There are legitimate concerns, but the hon. Member for Christchurch overstated them and they should be dealt with flexibly in regulations.

John Redwood: I share the worry felt by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch about part 3, which gives wide-ranging powers to local authorities that wish to take advantage of them to set up permit schemes. In particular, clause 36(5) gives local authorities substantial powers to set
	"the amount or maximum amount of any fee",
	to decide on
	"cases in which fees are not to be payable or could be repaid"
	and on
	"cases in which fees may be discounted".
	They are able to settle
	"the time and manner of making payment of fees"
	and
	"the application of sums paid by way of fees."
	In my experience, several local authorities—they are usually under Labour or Liberal Democrat control—are constantly on the lookout for new sources of revenue. As they have many ways of spending, or often wasting, the money, they wish to raise more. I fear that those local authorities would see public utility businesses as a soft target. They would, after all, be following the example of Her Majesty's Government, who saw them as a soft target in the run-up to the 1997 election, confirmed it in the Budget that introduced the utilities windfall tax, and continued it with their whopping auction tax on telecoms. Through this measure, the Government are effectively encouraging local authorities to see that device as a way of raising additional money.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch says that there is nothing wrong with a permit scheme, despite the bureaucracy and administrative effort involved, if it achieves the ostensible objective of the provisions. Let us remind ourselves of that objective—it is to say to utility companies that there is a cost to the rest of us when they dig up the street or road, and that it would be a good idea if they did it in as timely a way as possible, restricted the amount of road that they damaged or dug up at any given time to allow traffic to flow on the remaining part of the carriageway, rather than closing a large amount or all of it, and entered and exited the streetworks at times of day or year that do the least damage to traffic flows in the area concerned.
	It is a matter of great concern to many of us that some local highways authorities and utility companies decide to embark on streetworks at the beginning of a busy term just in time for the first day back at school, which always increases traffic dramatically. We often see a cessation or reduction in roadworks during less busy times of year—in the summer holidays, for example, when traffic flows are much less because there is no school run and many more people are away on holiday. We often note that roadworks do not continue over the weekend, when traffic may be rather less, and that there is considerable blockage of the road on the Monday morning or Friday evening peak when traffic congestion is at its worst.
	Therefore, as someone who does not much like administrative intervention and regulation, I can live with the idea that there should be a permit scheme to regulate roadworks in the interests of making better use of the highway and increasing the capacity of the road system, particularly at busy times of day in busy areas. That may be a necessary evil. What worries me, however, is that without the amendment wisely tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch, part 3 does not make it clear enough that its only intention is to discipline utilities and to encourage limited entry to the highway and entry only at the least difficult times of day or year. The Bill contains no statement that would prevent a local authority from seeing it as offering up a soft target for raising money.
	We argued long and hard in Committee about why the proposals to limit or regulate access to the highway for roadworks do not apply to the public sector, because observation tells us that more often than not it is the highways authority, not the utilities, that does that work. I hope that the Minister will say more about that at the appropriate moment. As the Bill concentrates on the utility companies, it is most important that Ministers understand the strength of feeling on the part of people of all parties and of no party that there are far too many roadworks, that they are badly organised, and that they often run into periods of time or periods of the day when it would be far better if the highway were open to traffic.

Brian White: The right hon. Gentleman is giving a generalised picture that does not reflect what really goes on. In the case of the telecoms companies, for example, most of the cabling has already been done, so most of the works that remain to be done are minor.

John Redwood: I accept that that means that such work may be much easier to regulate or does not need regulation at all. I would still hope, however, that the highways authority would take a view and suggest to the telecoms utility concerned that it would be good idea to do the work on a dull Sunday rather than a busy Monday. That would be a necessary improvement on the current regime.
	I hope that the basis of any guidelines issued under part 3 will be to make more intelligent use of what highway we have and to limit the amount of restrictions upon it. It would be sensible, for example, for highways authorities to point out to water, gas, electricity or telecoms utilities that the repair or replacement work that they are doing can often be done in sections and that it would be possible, at half-past 4 or 5 o'clock at night, when the employees are thinking of going home, to close off the hole in the road again with a temporary or permanent closure of filling or tarmac so that the road can be reopened for use when they are not working on it. It would be possible to do something similar to ensure that the road is open for busy morning peaks and that the roadworks can be done thereafter.
	Those are the sorts of measures for which the highways authorities should use their permit powers. If the amendment is rejected, however, greedy councils may decide that this is a marvellous opportunity to charge utilities a lot of money for engaging in streetworks and opening up the road. They may not be interested in the overall intention of speeding up the works or having them done at sensible times of the day or year, but may see a lot of advantage in allowing the utility to run on with the works, maximising the inconvenience to motorists, because they will generate more cash from the permit scheme.
	I strongly recommend the new clause to the House. Without it, we will end up with another utility stealth tax that will undoubtedly have to be passed on to all our constituents in the way that my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch describes.

Eric Forth: I wonder whether the new clause moved by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) is either otiose or entirely at odds with what I thought was our party's policy. I am rather puzzled, following the points that my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) made. He reminded the House that clause 36(5) says:
	"Permit regulations may make provision for or in connection with requiring the payment of a fee in respect of an application for a permit or the issue of a permit, including provision as to . . . the amount or maximum amount of any fee".
	My reading of that is that it has the potential to cover the matter that has caused such concern to be expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch and my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham. I wonder how much added value there is in the words proposed in the new clause. On the face of it, the Bill as drafted seems to make more than adequate provision.
	May I say in passing that I am uncomfortable with the immense degree of bureaucracy involved in this whole exercise? For example, clause 33—which is in part 3, the subject of new clause 2—says:
	"A local highway authority, or two or more such authorities acting together, may prepare and submit to the appropriate national authority a permit scheme."
	That takes us deep into the jungle of bureaucracy—up to our armpits or beyond. We have in that provision the lethal combination of local authorities on the one hand and national bureaucracies on the other. Yet, although I am sorry to say this, my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch seems to be adding to that bureaucracy in a most regrettable way.
	I may be labouring under a misapprehension, and I am sure that one of my hon. Friends will put me right if I am, but I thought that the whole thrust of my party's policy was local autonomy and local decision making. I have heard many of my right hon. and hon. Friends speak at great length, and with passion, about the need to give local bodies—be they school boards, local authorities or anything else—the maximum possible degree of discretion in making decisions for which they are accountable to their electorate. However, I now find to my astonishment that my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch has come along with new clause 2, which apparently seeks to overturn that whole philosophy, because it says:
	"No fee in respect of any application . . . shall be set at a level higher than that necessary to cover the administrative costs".

John Redwood: My right hon. Friend protests too much. The purpose of new clause 2 is to signal clearly that the measure is not a tax. Local authorities have other taxes that they impose, but this should be simply an administrative charge that reflects the cost of giving the public something that many of them want: greater access to their roads.

Eric Forth: That might be my right hon. Friend's view, but—

John Redwood: It is.

Eric Forth: My view, however—as I am the one speaking, I think that my view has primacy at the moment—is that local authorities should be given the scope and freedom to charge a fee, even if we call that a tax, at their discretion, for which they are accountable to their voters. That is the burden of my argument. I thought, in the most peremptory way, that that was the thrust of our policy, but along comes my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch and tramples all over that. He is saying, in a heavy-handed way, that he has decided that were new clause 2 to be accepted, local authorities should not have that discretion. However, I bet that when my hon. Friend was the eminent, successful leader of Wandsworth borough council, he would have argued for such a stance and said, "Knowing the local conditions in Wandsworth, I, accountable as I am to my electorate, want us to have the freedom to impose such charges locally as I think are necessary."

Andrew Miller: May I ask the right hon. Gentleman if we are hearing a Tory split, or a Tory filibuster?

Eric Forth: No, we are hearing a mature Tory debate of the kind that—

Andrew Miller: It is a split, then.

Eric Forth: I do not want to be drawn into such an argument, but if the hon. Gentleman is saying that in the Labour party, new or old, a debate is now called a split, that tells us quite a lot about his party's mentality. In the new, thrusting, dynamic Conservative party we welcome debate because we are confident of our philosophy, particularly our philosophy on local government autonomy, if I may say so to my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch.

Christopher Chope: Will my right hon. Friend accept that the whole ethos of Wandsworth borough council, when I was privileged to be its leader, was to keep taxes down? We wanted to have low tax rather than to introduce new taxes.

Eric Forth: Yes, indeed. That was my hon. Friend's decision, and the people of Wandsworth rewarded him with a continuity of power unequalled in modern times. I am grateful to him for making that point. He made that decision and was rewarded by his electorate for it. Surely he would not now want to deny elected representatives in other local authorities the power to make different decisions for their areas. They might decide in this case, for their own reasons, that higher fees would be appropriate to their circumstances and conditions. That is why I am at a loss to understand why my hon. Friend is trying to persuade the House that somehow, in a Bill—

Brian White: Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that the utilities and other companies that will have to pay the costs have expressed concern about the impact that those costs will have on them? That is not the same as the argument that he is making.

Eric Forth: I shall carry the argument some way to make my point, but if a local authority were to set fees at a prohibitive level, the utilities might not undertake the repairs and improvements that they wanted to and the local populace would suffer as a result. It would then be for the local voters to make their decision, on the basis that the exorbitant fees being charged by their elected representatives were having a counter-productive effect on their lifestyle. For example, knowing the hon. Gentleman's expertise and interest in such esoteric matters as broadband, I suspect that he thinks that every home should be served by the ghastly internet, and that the horrible material on it should be accessed by every household, perhaps regardless of the cost. I would take a different view, and suggest that if his local authority were wise enough to charge a penal fee to discourage the connection of the ghastly broadband and other internet services, his voters would be very grateful to him and to the local authority.

Christopher Chope: rose—

Eric Forth: But who am I to make such a judgment? I know not about such matters, and they are not for me or, may I say, even for my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch to comment on. He looks pregnant, so I shall give way to him.

Christopher Chope: I hope that my right hon. Friend will not allow his prejudice against broadband to disguise the fact that there are statutory duties relating to the safety of gas mains and the provision of water, which local authorities need to take into account. If they impose substantial extra taxes on the provision and maintenance of those key facilities, the undertakers will not be able to avoid paying those taxes.

Eric Forth: And indeed, to follow that point, the undertakers will not be able to avoid increasing their charges to their consumers, who will then be able to make a market judgment. What puzzles me, coming from my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch and my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham, of all people, is that that they seem to be shrinking from allowing a market judgment. In the end, two mechanisms are in play on this point: the political, electoral mechanism of local authorities and the market mechanism between the utilities and their consumers, who happen in this case to be coincidental with the voters. I should have thought that that would appeal to my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch, and I can see that he is thinking about it, which encourages me to hope that he might reconsider his position. In the end, however, I need to hear much more from him, and I hope that when he winds up this little debate, he will give further arguments to explain why he seems so wedded to a degree of central control and fiat that is completely at odds with his distinguished political history and his political philosophy. That is my problem with new clause 2.
	To return to where I came in, were my right hon. and hon. Friends to want to go down this route in any case, my reading of the original wording of the Bill is that it probably provides sufficient powers in the key phrase
	"the amount or maximum amount of any fee",
	although I accept that that implies a degree of centrality, central control and omniscience—not to say omnipotence—that I find distressing. However, if my right hon. and hon. Friends want the words, they are there in the Bill already, and I hope that they will reconsider the position that they have taken in new clause 2 and seek leave to withdraw it.
	I am equally horrified by amendment No. 10, because here we are introduced to the phrase
	"standard provisions which must be included",
	which strikes me as amazingly prescriptive, and to the provision
	"to ensure that a single electronic noticing system may be used".

John Redwood: If my right hon. Friend reads the amendment clearly, he will find that it includes the words
	"within the authority's area",
	so his argument about local autonomy is quite irrelevant. In this amendment, my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch is preserving the right of the authority to make a recommendation, but saying that it should be consistent throughout the authority area.

Eric Forth: Again, that should be a matter for the local authority itself. Why do we need a form of words to be put on the face of the Bill to tell a local authority to do something that it should be perfectly capable of deciding for itself? I do not think that this is a particularly circular argument, or even, dare I say it, a repetitive one, as I have now moved on to amendment No. 10 as opposed to new clause 2. Surely the local authority should be allowed to make its own decision about whether standard provisions should be included, even within its area. It is just conceivable that, if a local authority covered a densely populated urban or suburban area as well as an element of rural hinterland, it might be appropriate to have different provisions for different parts of the area.
	Who would feel it incumbent on themselves to come along and put in cold print on the face of a statute these prescriptive requirements that intrude on the decision making of an elected and accountable local authority? A philosophical conflict is built in to what my right hon. and hon. Friends want to say about local authorities in the overall sense—with which I thoroughly agree, and which I applaud—and the thrust of what they are saying in new clause 2 and amendment No. 10. All in all, I am a bit unhappy about this, and I am very unhappy to find myself at odds with my right hon. and hon. Friends. I hope that, after the Minister has attempted to persuade the House of his position, my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch will take the opportunity to reconsider what he has brought to the House, to think about the overall context in which he is offering it to us, and to avoid any suggestion that this might be a blot on his otherwise immaculate reputation.

Tony McNulty: Perhaps I can steer a path between the extremes expressed by the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) and the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope), and the eminently sensible contribution from the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth). That is not an unusual thing to say, especially for those of us who spend our time haunting this place on Fridays. The right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst seems to save up his sensible suggestions for Fridays, but today he is clearly having a good day on a Tuesday, for which I am enormously grateful. He is right to suggest that these proposals are otiose, but I must provide a sting in the tail to his argument. If he is putting forward the broadly social libertarian local autonomy argument, I must part company from him, albeit gently. I agree with the thrust of what he has said, but his suggestions must be implemented within a framework of regulation and guidance.
	The new clause is otiose, as the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst suggests, and it tramples over local autonomy. I would also part company with him over his description of today's Conservatives as confident, bright young things compared with what they were in the past. We have to part company at some point.
	The right hon. Member for Wokingham gave the game away when he suggested that he wanted to send a signal that this scheme was not about stealth taxes or revenue raising, and that it was merely seeking to cover the cost of administration, as I suggested in Committee. With the greatest of respect, legislation is not the place for sending signals. The Bill should do what it purports to do and no more. The right hon. Gentleman can send signals in a little column in The Spectator or the Wokingham Gazette or Bugle, but not in the Bill. That would be as inappropriate as the—what is the polite word?—rantings of the hon. Member for Christchurch about the figure of £55 per household. Just because something is repeated often enough, or appears often enough in The Mail or The Express—

Christopher Chope: And The Sun.

Tony McNulty: The Mirror or The Sun, whatever you like—anything at the murkier end of what purports to be the media in this country. Just because such things appear often enough, it does not mean that they are true.

Eric Forth: On that very point, does the Minister recall "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime"? Does not that belie what he has just said?

Tony McNulty: I do not think that we put a price on that in quite the same way as the hon. Member for Christchurch did when he suggested that the measures would cost £55 per household. So, the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst and I have parted company again, which disappoints me as we usually get along so splendidly.
	Many of the points made by Conservative Members fall into the trap of seeing the amendment, and all the clauses to which it refers, in total isolation from the rest of the Bill. They included the suggestion that the proposal is a devious scheme to get more money for local authorities, of whatever persuasion. When we consider the measures that the Conservatives constantly refer to in their fight-back for the drivers of middle Britain, and when we consider in detail the implementation of these schemes, there is not a whole lot of difference between the political parties in terms of what they do out there in the big wide world. There is no difference at all, save for the propensity for casualties in their areas.
	The right hon. Member for Wokingham suggested that local authorities up and down the country would deliberately carry on street works for as long as possible just to extract as much money as possible from the contractors. That is in stark contrast to the provisions of clauses 16 and 17, and to all that we have said about network management duty. If an authority tried to utilise a permit scheme, suitably applied for and allowed, simply to clog up the streets—which by definition it would—simply to secure a revenue stream, it would not work because of the network management duty.

John Redwood: Will the hon. Gentleman firm up that promise? Is he saying that Ministers will have to ensure that the local authorities insist on speedy street works and will impose only administrative charges on people and not unrealistically high fines?

Tony McNulty: I would like to go all the way with the right hon. Gentleman in that regard, but I cannot because that issue is outwith the full comprehensive nature of the Bill. I cannot say yes to that question in isolation from the whole range of other elements of the network management duty that we went through in detail in Committee. It was clear from our discussions and from what will be in the guidance that that duty is not simply about the flow of traffic or the speed of that flow. It is not just about the absence of congestion; there is a whole range of things involved, as we explored in Committee. I agree with the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst that the new clause is otiose, for some of the reasons that he has given, and others.
	New clause 2 would mean that a fee for any application for a permit or the issue of a permit could not be set at a level higher than the administrative costs to the permit authority of responding to a permit application, issuing the permit and maintaining a register of permits. I said clearly in Committee, and I repeat that permit schemes are not designed as means of raising extra revenue for local authorities. They are intended as a way of enabling all potentially disruptive activities in the street—be they utility works, local authorities' own works, the placing of skips or whatever—to be managed in an integrated and co-ordinated way.
	Crucially, as my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes, North-East (Brian White) suggested, we have set up a working group on which all those parties sit—the utilities, local authorities and others—and charged them with considering the details of how permit schemes might work and making recommendations to the Government. That will enable us to provide in regulations and guidance that very framework within which—here I come back onside with the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst—those decisions can be made at local level to determine whether those involved want to pursue a permit scheme or otherwise.
	I have to say again that the hon. Member for Christchurch goes on and on as though these are schemes—not only those involving permits, but others—that we are about to impose directly by compulsion on each and every highway authority in the land. We are not doing that in any way, shape or form, but we want to work with the parties on which these proposals will have the most direct impact. That will enable us to draw up regulations setting out the standard arrangements applying to the schemes, as well as guidance for those operating schemes and those who would need to apply for permits. By pure coincidence, the first meeting of that working group is being held today, just around the corner.
	Among other things, the group will look at exactly what activities would require permits and what level fees should be set at. In considering fee levels, it will look not only at the costs of operating schemes, but, entirely appropriately, at whether it would be sensible to set different fees according to differing circumstances. That involves the flexible standardisation that the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst suggested.
	It is appropriate to have a framework, clearly established, within which these decisions can be made, but the whole array of ideas on how to go forward with a permit scheme should be left to the local authority. For instance, should all activities attract the same fee or should the fees be varied according to when, where and how they are carried out? Those involved will also look at how, if at all, permit schemes would fit in with existing arrangements such as that for charging utilities whose works overrun an agreed deadline. We want to give the group the flexibility to look at all those relevant issues.
	In the light of the group's work, but above and beyond the working party, we will hold, later in the year, a widespread public consultation on draft regulations before those are brought to Parliament. As the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst suggests, new clause 2 is otiose, but I am a fair man. Broadly, we still have consensus in most of the House, although there is clearly disagreement and disarray in some parts. Having made those comments, I will take this away and consider what the hon. Member for Christchurch has said on the issue so that at a later stage in the Bill's passage through Parliament—in another place—we can perhaps provide more information on the Government's intentions.
	I say that deliberately, because when the Bill reaches the end of the legislative process, I want it and the subsequent guidance and regulations to be fully informed by the working group and the involvement of local authorities, utilities and other operators. That will enable us to sign off those regulations and the guidance with as much agreement as we can—in some cases, people subsequently decide that there are all sorts of difficulties with such regulation and guidance—as early as we can. Then we can leave it, within the framework of regulations and guidance, to the local authorities to determine whether they want to pursue a scheme. We will have a look at what the hon. Member for Christchurch has said, by all means, but first we should let the working group have a look at the thing.
	Amendment No. 10 would appear to require that regulations made under clause 36 must ensure reasonable consistency between permit schemes. The hon. Gentleman is entirely right: I said in Committee that that would be of use—certainly within authorities, but between authorities as well—if there were some commonalities. I do not want to put too many consensual words in the mouth of the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, but, as he suggests, much that will be needed in terms of standardisation could be dealt with in regulations.
	The regulations would have to set out certain standard provisions that were common to all permit schemes, especially in relation to electronic noticing systems. I agree with the hon. Member for Christchurch that it is desirable that there should be some standardisation—I have already alluded to that—but it cannot be sensible to have dozens of entirely different schemes operating in different parts of the country. Many utilities, although not all by any means, work nationally and some standardisation is appropriate, but I do not believe that we need such prescription in the Bill, as this issue can safely be dealt with through regulations.
	The working group, which we have set up to consider the details of permit regulations and the accompanying guidance, has been asked specifically to consider the issue of standardisation. I suspect that there will be some merit in going down that road. The group will make recommendations to us later in the summer on that and other matters, after which we will again go out to wide public consultation on the way forward.
	Amendment No. 11 is, I understand, intended to enable permit regulations to deal with highway authorities having to obtain permits for their own works and to record those on a permit register. Again, the amendment is unnecessary. The interpretation provision in clause 38(1) already makes it clear that the scope of "works" means that permit schemes can include works carried out under the Highways Act 1980. That covers a wide range of works carried out by highway authorities, including road maintenance works, construction of bridges and introduction of traffic-calming measures.
	The regulation-making powers can enable those works to be subject to a permit scheme anyway, taking into account the unavoidably different considerations that apply in regulating the activities of public authorities and private companies.
	We have asked the working group looking at permit regulations and guidance to consider how the works carried out by highway authorities can be incorporated within the scope of permit schemes. The aim behind permit schemes is to improve the management of all works in the street, including highway authorities' own works.
	Amendment No. 12 would have such effect that a street authority could not give an undertaker a direction relating to the timing of one of its street works where a permit had already been issued for that works. Clause 36(8) provides that regulations made by the appropriate national authority may set out provisions that modify or disapply primary and subordinate legislation. Depending on the exact structure of permit schemes decided on in the light of consultation and the work of the working group, I would expect it to be necessary for the regulations to set aside certain sections of the New Roads and Street Works Act 1991, which set down how, where and when works can be carried out. That is needed to ensure, as the hon. Member for Christchurch suggested, that we do not duplicate controls in certain areas.
	We have asked the working group to consider which existing legislation should be dealt with in that way. The power to make directions under section 56 of that Act may be one that we would want to set aside in cases where a permit has been issued. Again, that is a matter for the working group to consider rather than for the Bill prescribe. The scope to alter provisions is appropriate and already in place.
	In view of my comments and the excellent contribution, by and large, from the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, I am sure that Conservative Members feel able with confidence to withdraw the proposed new clause. As we suggested in Committee, the working groups that are bringing together local authorities, operators, utilities and other interests should put the real framework in place, so that we can take matters forward. I seriously ask the hon. Member for Christchurch to withdraw the new clause so that we maintain the consensus—shaky though it may now appear—that has driven us thus far on Report.

Christopher Chope: We have had an excellent debate and, as with that on new clause 1, it was all the better for the fact that the Liberal Democrats did not participate.
	The debate centred largely on intellectual and philosophical purity. My right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) and I are on one side of the argument; my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) is on the other. My right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst identified a paternalistic streak in me but in the past, a paternalistic streak was found in him—when my right hon. Friend was forced, probably against his intellectual judgment, to regulate activity centres following the Lyme bay tragedy, in direct response to a private Member's Bill presented by the hon. Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Mr. Jamieson). Neither my right hon. Friend nor I can say, much as we might wish, that we are absolutely consistent in our intellectual purity.

Eric Forth: Surely my hon. Friend accepts that I was a Minister then. He is only in the Opposition now.

Christopher Chope: Is my right hon. Friend saying that he was a pressed man, whereas I am volunteering?

Eric Forth: Something like that.

Christopher Chope: If that is the best mitigation that my right hon. Friend can put forward, I leave it to others to judge.
	I am disappointed that my right hon. Friend did not highlight that the House is being bypassed by the vast range of regulation-making powers in the Bill—particularly in that part to which new clause 2 relates. Only a few days ago, a leading article in the Financial Times stated that regulation is the new clause IV. The Government are using regulation instead of nationalisation to achieve their objectives. The Bill contains an enormous number of regulation-making powers over which the House will have little control.
	The issue is whether one believes in low taxes, be they transparent or imposed by stealth—though we are against stealth taxes. We want low taxation. We want to protect householders from the £55 per annum burden represented by part 3. The figures have not been dreamt up by me but are the result of careful analysis by the National Joint Utilities Group.
	When we put the new clause to the vote, as we intend, those who support it will be voting on behalf of hard-pressed householders by saying, "We do not think that you should be burdened with an extra £55 a year on your utility bills." Those right hon. and hon. Members who enter the No Lobby will be saying that they are indifferent to those householders' plight.

Question put, That the clause be read a Second time:—
	The House divided: Ayes 175, Noes 285.

Question accordingly negatived.

New Clause 4
	 — 
	Use of Bus Lanes

'Any motor vehicle with two or more passengers shall be entitled at any time to use any carriageway marked out as a bus lane.'.—[Mr. Greg Knight.]
	Brought up, and read the First time.

Greg Knight: I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: With this it will be convenient to discuss new clause 6—Bus lanes (use by other vehicles)—
	'. All bus lanes where buses are moving in the same direction as traffic in the adjacent or vehicle lane shall be open to use by cycles, motorcycles, licensed taxis and invalid vehicles.'.

Greg Knight: It must be about 25 years ago that the first bus lane was introduced in the United Kingdom. I think that it is appropriate, as this Bill is before us, that we take a look again at the operation of bus lanes in the UK to see whether we can strike a better balance and get more use out of bus lane capacity. All too often, we see empty bus lanes and congestion in other lanes. For much of the day in some cities, traffic is at a standstill, while alongside that congestion there are empty bus carriageways.
	When bus lanes were introduced, they were sold to the public as a way of decreasing pollution by allowing buses to have quicker access to and from city centres. The argument went that if people caught the bus they would find that their journey was quicker because the bus would be able to use a dedicated bus lane. We were told that that was the environmentally friendly way to travel. However, I think we would all accept—at least I hope we would all accept—that bus lanes have not worked as well as we were told they would on their introduction. The reason for that is that, in many city centres during the rush hour, a third of the road capacity in one direction in some cases, and in others up to half the road capacity, is taken up with a dedicated bus lane.

Eric Forth: Does my right hon. Friend agree that enforcement of bus lane discipline is sadly lacking? I do not know whether he shares my experience but, driving in London, I see a rather regrettable number of violations of bus lanes, with apparently very little effort to enforce them. Does he not agree that enforcement, together with his proposal, would make a great difference?

Greg Knight: I would warn drivers who think that they can use the bus lane without getting caught to take care, because cameras have been installed at the front of buses to act as a video policing unit and record the details of any vehicle transgressing the current rules. I welcome that development. My right hon. Friend is right that enforcement has been and remains to some extent a problem, but detection rates are on the up because of the use of new technology.
	Law-abiding drivers have to sit in their cars in long traffic queues, increasing not only pollution but anger and frustration.

Andrew Miller: They could get on the bus.

Greg Knight: Contrary to that sotto voce contribution, that is not an option that is available or appropriate to every motorist. Some people find that, although the bus may cover part of their journey, if they are travelling to a rural area such as East Yorkshire, the service is either woefully inadequate or non-existent. It is simplistic attitudes such as the hon Gentleman's that got us into this position. Many motorists cannot use a bus because it does not take them where they need to go. The enemy here should be pollution, not the motor car. As cars become less polluting, his attitude towards them should become more benign.
	Given that bus lanes do not work as well as we were told they would 25 years ago, it is now appropriate to reconsider the rules and guidance on their operation and try to make them work better. New clause 4 is designed to encourage car sharing. Its scope does not extend to contraflow carriageways: I do not argue that those should be opened up to other traffic, but a with-flow carriageway could be used by shared cars.
	This is not a unique or new proposition. Car sharing is encouraged in many states in the United States of America. If there are more than two passengers, the car is entitled to use a dedicated lane. There is a real incentive to share a journey and thereby reduce car use, in turn reducing congestion.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) was concerned in an earlier debate about taking discretion away from local authorities. I accept that the new clause would do that, but I say good, because they have been singularly unimaginative in their approach to tackling this problem. I do not say that the Minister was misleading, but I do not think he painted an accurate picture when he replied to a similar debate in Committee. He gave the impression that it is all down to the local authority, but I have obtained a copy of the guidance issued by his Department, and it is not neutral on the subject.
	On page 15 of "Keeping Buses Moving" there is a reference to other vehicles using bus lanes. It says that this
	"could encourage the rather different result of a switch to car sharing by public transport passengers".
	However, it does not go on to say why reaction over here should be any different from what happens in the United States. The next paragraph says:
	"It is considered that while there can be no general case for allowing high occupancy vehicles to use bus lanes, there may be special situations where a high occupancy lane would be justified."
	The guidance is designed to dissuade local authorities from introducing bus lanes that other vehicles could use. That is a shame, and whether or not the Minister feels that local authorities should continue to have such flexibility, I hope that he will say today that ministerial encouragement should be given to innovation in this area. I also hope that he is prepared to encourage local authorities to establish whether car sharing in the United Kingdom would help to decrease the congestion that is all too often present in urban areas, not just in rush hours but for most of the day.

Gwyneth Dunwoody: I do not intend to detain the House for very long on this subject, but I want to discuss a very real problem that I have encountered. I have discussed it with the Department, but I received a factual reply that did not deal with it at all. I ask the Minister to give a moment's thought to the unfortunate milkmen in inner-city areas. Milk floats, which are by definition extremely slow and rather unwieldy, rightly have to avoid inner bus lanes because they would constitute a hazard. But delivering to customers in inner-city areas has become so difficult that many milkmen do not know how to proceed. One unfortunate milkman incurred £450 worth of fines in one week, which was more than he earned. If we as a nation want to encourage people to continue to buy bottled milk, we should think seriously about this issue.
	I should tell the Minister that I do not have any pet solutions—would that I did—but the traffic authorities need to be told that we desperately need such small tradesmen to continue to offer a service, particularly in urban areas. If they cannot deliver, they will soon give up trying and make their money elsewhere, which would be to the detriment of such services.
	In talking about clearing bus lanes, we should also consider the plight of the service provider during certain working hours. I do not pretend that finding a solution will be simple, but unfortunately, the suggestion that milk be delivered during the night—superficially, that seems a good answer—ignores the fact that if it is delivered at such times in urban areas, it is not on the doorstep when the householder gets up in the morning.

John Redwood: Will the hon. Lady give way?

Gwyneth Dunwoody: I am happy to give way on the subject of milk bottles.

John Redwood: Is the hon. Lady suggesting to the Minister that small delivery vehicles should be exempt from bus lane rules? I would have a lot of sympathy with such a proposal.

Gwyneth Dunwoody: I hesitate to suggest that, but we do need to find a way to enable people to continue to deliver goods. I do not have a lot of sympathy for the very large chains, which could organise their deliveries accordingly and keep people on at night to open up stores and let in deliveries; however, for individual tradesmen this problem constitutes a significant hazard. Indeed, it is worrying many people and putting them off wanting to do the job.
	Would that I had an answer for the Minister. This is perhaps a unique parliamentary occasion, in that I have nothing to suggest, but he need only tell me that he will think hard about the matter and come up with a usable scheme.

Paul Marsden: The intention behind new clause 4 is laudable. Given the need to reduce congestion, any suggestion that involves cars carrying more than one passenger is good in principle. The difficulty lies in the practical enforcement. I suspect that one of two scenarios will arise. To enforce the provision, an enormous amount of extra resources will have to be invested to provide more cameras to watch bus lanes; or we will end up like the United States, where there is a booming trade in suitcases containing pop-up secondary figures, which can be placed in the front passenger seat in order to fool traffic wardens and police officers. It is then going to be a waste of time, and it will also defeat the object of reducing congestion. On some urban roads where there are regular bus services—let us say every eight, 10 or 15 minutes—the congestion will clearly be worsened by cars being allowed into the bus lanes.
	I am more than happy, however, to support new clause 6, proposed by the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood). It is eminently sensible and it highlights the current problem of enormous local variations, which leave many cyclists and motor cyclists confused as to whether they can or cannot use bus lanes. I hope that the Government will therefore accept new clause 6, but the Liberal Democrats cannot support new clause 4.

Lembit �pik: Does my hon. Friend agree that for single user travel, motor cycles represent an environmental benefit compared to cars; secondly, that motor cyclists are on the whole pretty responsible in their use of bus lanes; and, thirdly, that the Government themselves promised before 1997 to put motor cycles at the heart of their transport strategies? Would it not be odd if the Government now refused to take seriously the provisions of new clause 6, so sensibly proposed by the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood)?

Paul Marsden: I agree with my hon. Friend and I hope that the Minister will deal with that in his reply.
	As I said before, I would be interested to know whether the Conservative Front Benchers have costed the enforcement of the provisions in order to transform what seems to be a good idea into a practical outcome that would reduce congestion.

John Redwood: I rise to support my new clauses 4 and 6. With the oral amendment suggested by my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Mr. Knight)that this should apply only to bus lanes where the traffic is moving in the same direction in and adjacent to the lanenew clause 4 makes a great deal of sense. Furthermore new clause 4 is complementary to my new clause 6. There is some overlap. For example, under new clause 4, a taxi with a passenger would automatically be able to use the bus lane, because it would be a
	vehicle with two or more passengers.
	Depending on the definition of vehicle, the same would apply to a motor cycle with a passenger and there are other overlaps with public service vehicles.
	I hope that, on further reflection after hearing my remarks, my right hon. Friend might see the advantages of my new clause 6, as the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Mr. Marsden) has kindly done. The purpose of both new clauses is, as my right hon. Friend pointed out, to make greater use of the space of a bus lane without in any way impeding the progress of the bus. The purpose of the bus lane is to allow the bus to hit faster journey times with greater reliability. I do not believe that the proposals in either new clausecertainly not in new clause 6would in normal circumstances get in the way of achieving that.
	In the case of new clause 6, I would argue that there are not only advantages stemming from greater use of the highway, but overriding safety considerations, to which I should like to draw the House's attention. The Liberal Democrats have briefly referred to them and I would have thought that they would recommend themselves to Ministers. Under the new clause,
	cycles, motorcycles, licensed taxis and invalid vehicles
	would be entitled to use the bus lane. The case for each is a little different, as I should like to explain.
	First, there is the cycle or push bike. I believe that it is very dangerous for cyclists in busy urban areaswhere bus lanes are usually locatedto have to jostle between large and sometimes fast-moving buses on the inside lane and every sort of vehicle ranging from fast cars to extremely heavy lorries on the outside lane, especially on narrow highways that may not initially have been designed to have both a bus lane and a mixed-vehicle lane in the same place.
	According to the highway code, cyclists should occupy the inside of the mixed-vehicle lane, which means that they are just on the outside of the bus lane. That can be an extremely dangerous position. A bus can whistle along in the bus lane, which its driver can reasonably expect to be free. However, the driver must make the difficult judgment about whether a cyclist has the extra inches of clearance at the edge of the bus lane necessary for the safe passage of both vehicles. At the same time, the drivers of cars or lorries in the other lane might be attempting to overtake the cyclist, not realising that a bus is about to create the pressureor pinch pointon the cyclist. That often leaves very little wobble room for the cyclist. [Interruption.] I see that the Minister is yawning, but he should appreciate the plight of cyclists in this respect. Although a bicycle may be correctly placed on the road, there may be a little overhang in the bus lane.

David Jamieson: Yes, I did yawn, partly because the right hon. Gentleman is going on at such length. Unless a local authority says otherwise, cyclists are permitted to use cycle lanes. That is why I was looking a little bored.

John Redwood: That is right, and if a cycle lane is provided along with a bus lane and a mixed-vehicle lane, my argument does not apply. However, there are many locations in the areas in which I travel regularly where there is no cycle lane parallel to the bus and mixed-vehicle lanes. My brief analysis of the cyclist's plight is very relevant and the Minister should listen carefully. I speak for many cycling interests outside the House. They would tell the Minister how perilous it can be to occupy the exposedbut correctposition on the highway, between fast travelling buses and relatively slow travelling other vehicles. That is where cyclists can get squeezed.

Greg Knight: Perhaps my right hon. Friend and I can shake the Minister out of his boredom. Is he aware that, in 1995, the Conservative Government gave the go-ahead for a trial in the Bristol area allowing motor cyclists to use bus lanes? A period of assessment was given to determine whether there was any detrimental effect on safety, and I understand that the safety record was excellent. Is it not now time for us to grasp the opportunity and introduce the provision elsewhere?

John Redwood: I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, and I shall come to the subject of motor cycles when I have finished talking about cyclists. New clause 6 would give cyclists the choice about where to ride. I think that most would prefer to ride in the bus lane, close to the kerb. There are fewer buses than other vehicles, and bus drivers would be aware that cyclists could be encountered there. As they approached from behind, bus drivers would be under a duty to move out around the cyclist if there was a potential conflict. Cyclists in that position would not then face the twin pressures of the mixed-vehicle lane and the bus lane at the same time.
	My proposal means, however, that cyclists could be on the inside of the mixed-vehicle lane and the bus lane, if that is what made sense in the circumstances. Also, a cyclist who wanted to turn right would have to move over to the inside of the mixed-vehicle lane to complete the manoeuvre. Cyclists would therefore have greater flexibility. They are the most vulnerable of road users, and that necessary extra flexibility would be welcome.

Eric Forth: Does my right hon. Friend accept that there is a potential problem here? Cyclists who use the inside of the designated bus lanewhich I hope will include vehicles in multiple occupationforce the drivers of buses and other vehicles to move out when they want to pass. That partly blocks the mixed-vehicle lane. Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is possible that the total traffic flow will slow down as a result? Has he taken that into account?

John Redwood: I have taken it into account, but the problem is not major. The advantage of my proposal is that, in normal circumstances, the bus will be travelling much more quickly than the cyclist. The manoeuvre involved will therefore take only a very limited time. There will be problems in very heavy traffic, but I submit that even bigger problems will remain if this extra flexibility that I propose is not given to cyclists. The congestion incident that my right hon. Friend described will still occur, but cyclists would occupy a different position on the highway. If the highway is not wide enough to accommodate bike, bus and other vehiclesthe analysis offered by my right hon. Friendit will not be wide enough to accommodate bus, bike and other vehicles, which is the disposition covered by my new clause. I think, therefore, that my right hon. Friend's point is not strong: the case is neutral, because both analyses reveal that a problem is created when a highway is too narrow to accommodate a bus lane and another lane.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire has indicated that motor cycles are a different case. The extra flexibility would be a good idea for them, because we have all experienced motor cyclists weaving in and out of heavy traffic to get to the front of the queue and optimise the power and relative thinness of their machines compared with other vehicles. Giving motor cyclists the choice between the bus lane or the multiple-occupancy vehicle lane would probably help to minimise incidents in which they collide with wing mirrors or other parts of vehicles in the multiple-occupancy vehicle lane.
	Motor cycles would not get in the way of buses because in practically every case they have better performance than buses and obviously keep themselves well out of the way, normally by accelerating away from contact. Such flexibility would be an added welcome freedom for motor cyclists and would reduce conflicts between them and other vehicles. They are currently crowded into the multiple-occupancy vehicle lane and cannot get into the bus lane to get free of other vehicles, which might reduce collisions as bus lanes tend not to be used and are more likely to contain free space for motor cyclists.

Lembit �pik: The Motor Cycle Industry Association has examined the evidence and made it clear that it is safer for motor cyclists and better for the environment to make it easier for people to use two wheels instead of four when they choose to travel alone. That point is born out by the expert literature, including Motor Cycle News, which backs up the right hon. Gentleman's point that there is no downside to allowing motor cyclists in bus lanes because buses will never be held up by higher-performing motor cycles.

John Redwood: I agree with the hon. Gentleman's views. Motor cycles will not normally hold up buses, and allowing them to go in bus lanes will give them greater flexibility. The multiple-occupancy vehicle lane is often congested, which makes it difficult for motor cyclists and other vehicle users.
	The green argument, which probably informed much of the original work on bus lanes, contains a mistake. The sad truth is that buses travel around this country with, on the whole, few occupants. The average bus has only nine passengers, although occupancy is obviously much better during rush hours in urban areas. If a bus is travelling around with so few passengers, it is, of course, a less green option than all those people travelling in their respective modern motor cars. The average bus is quite old and average fuel efficiency is very poor as a result. It is a less green option to switch people out of modern cars into older buses unless the buses achieve high occupancy rates, which is a point that should inform debate on the selection of bus lanes. The green argument for bus lanes only holds in areas in which high occupancy can be obtained with frequent services that people can rely on.
	The case for licensed taxis is easy. Licensed taxis are, after all, public service vehicles that offer a service to the general public, and they often help those who find it most difficult to get around in our community. I should have thought that they, like buses, should obtain some advantage from the use of privileged lanes. That is not only my view but that of many Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative councils around the country, which can allow taxis in bus lanes.
	In many cities, oddly, some bus lanes allow taxis and others do not. In some cities, some lanes are taxi friendly and others are not. Such situations make it difficult for novice taxi drivers, and taxi passengers cannot understand why they sometimes buy an advantage and other times do not. A general measure to allow taxis in bus lanes would be welcome to taxi drivers and passengers countrywide. The point is certainly important in the evenings when people want to go out. If it were easier and cheaper to use taxis because they travel quickly down bus lanes, it would encourage people to use them rather than their own cars, and if people are tempted to have a drink there is no possible danger to them or other road users.
	Finally, invalid vehicles are slow-moving vehicles used by some of the most vulnerable people in our community. I am not saying that they must use the bus laneit is difficult for them to decide where they should go on a busy road with both a bus lane and a multiple-occupancy vehicle lanebut it would be good to give them the choice because some of them might feel safer if, like bicycles, they travelled close to the curb with a threat from one stream of traffic only rather than having to travel in the multiple-occupancy vehicle lane. That lane probably contains a threat from both types of traffic because invalid vehicles are often relatively narrow and other vehicles think that they can get past them, which is not always the case on a narrow stretch of two-lane road.
	It must be terrifying for some people in those vehicles on busy roads with two lanes, where they are sandwiched in the middle. I would like to give them the choice. They would not have to use the bus lane, but they would probably welcome the choice. I hope that I can persuade my right hon. and hon. Friends and the Liberal Democrats to agree with new clause 6, and I am happy to support new clause 4, especially with the amendment to make it clear that it does not apply to contraflow bus lanes.

Eric Forth: I admit that I am puzzled by what my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) has just said. I am not sure that there is an amendment to new clause 4. My right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Mr. Knight) tried to slip one in, rather cleverly, but I am not sure that it is valid. I am therefore puzzled as to whether I am debating the wording as it appears on the amendment paper, which states:
	Any motor vehicle with two or more passengers shall be entitled at any time to use any carriageway marked out as a bus lane.
	Perhaps my right hon. Friend, by some parliamentary sleight of hand of which I was hitherto unaware, has managed to change it to resemble more closely new clause 6.

John Redwood: I think that my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Mr. Knight) was hoping that the Minister would think that his suggestion was a good idea and would wish to have a similar amendment tabled in the other place.

Eric Forth: It remains to be seen whether my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire wishes the Minister to take up the wording on the amendment paper or the wording of his verbal amendment. I thought that I would try to clarify that point, and I am not sure that my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham has helped me to do so.
	I approach the issue from my experience of driving on the I-5, which passes through Seattle, between Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, British Columbia. On a lengthy stretch of that road, which is arguably one of the busiest interstates in the USA, especially at rush hour, there is a traffic lane dedicated to vehicles carrying two or more persons. From my observation of that experiment, it works well and makes a lot of sense. It is not a theoretical exercise, but a practical one. We can look to such examples, especially in the United States, and draw on them.

Gwyneth Dunwoody: Do I detect a slight imbalance in the amount of road space used by roads in the United States, especially in Oregon, compared with this country? From personal experience, Oregon is a rather larger county than any of the ones that the right hon. Gentleman and I normally deal with. Would not the space available affect the issue?

Eric Forth: The good people of Oregon would be extremely upset if their state were referred to as a county. It is a great state and it is indeed fairly large. We should bear it in mind that our entire country could fit into the state of Wyoming, which has a population of only some 500,000. However, it would appear that that is a thought upon which you do not wish me to dwell, Mr. Deputy Speaker, given the expression on your face. I take the hon. Lady's point. The United States has more space, generally speaking, for carriageways, even in the urban area of Seattle, but American vehicles are wider than ours. I do not wish to press the parallel to the distress of the hon. Lady, whose knowledge of such matters is greater than mine is ever likely to be. I simply raised the issue as a tentative example of how allowing a lane to be dedicated to a certain type of vehicle, whether for buses or vehicles in multiple occupation, is probably a good idea and seems to work well.
	The hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Mr. Marsden) raised a reasonable point about enforcement, which ties into the intervention I made as my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire introduced new clause 4. If there is a problem, it is the lack of proper enforcement of the bus lanes that already exist. To that extent, there might be a concomitant problem of enforcement if the new regime were put in place, but that is an argument for more effective enforcement in general rather than a specific objection to new clause 4. I hope that the Minister will examine the proposal positively following the debate and bear the enforcement point in mind.
	I generally followed the argument that my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham deployed when he spoke to new clause 6, although with the reservation that I expressed in my intervention. If we encouraged cycles and motor cycles, especially, to use such designated bus lanes, it might exacerbate traffic congestion because larger vehicles such as buses might be caused to swerve around two-wheeled vehicles and thus perhaps obstruct the mixed vehicle lane. However, I accept my right hon. Friend's analysis that that would probably be a price worth paying and that, given the benefits that we would get and the encouragement that the measure would give to people to use two-wheeled vehicles, it should probably at least be tried.
	The introduction of pilot schemes and observing how the system would work might be worth exploring, although that suggestion is not explicitly provided for in the new clauses. We do not need to rush into such schemes completely when we embark on them. I am sure that the Minister accepts that pilot schemes are often a good idea, especially when assessing such suggestions. Perhaps different variations of the scheme could be tried and observed.
	We thus come to the intriguing difference between new clause 4before the attempted verbal amendment on the hoof by my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire, which was a novel parliamentary experimentwhich would allow any carriageway to be used, and the more explicit provision drafted by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham in new clause 6, which would apply if traffic were
	moving in the same direction
	as buses. Perhaps, again, it would be worth piloting different approaches. I am intrigued by the prospect of contraflow traffic containing a mixture of different vehicles. It might sound like a recipe for chaos on the face of it, but it might work perfectly well and ease traffic flow in some circumstances. I would not want to dismiss either formulation out of hand. We could easily accept either formulation, determine how it works and find out how it could be extended nationwide.
	My right hon. Friends have done us a great service by proposing such imaginative and experimental ideas. I hope that the Minister is in an imaginative mood, although he does not seem to be in any sort of mood except a somnolent one. When he replies to the debate, I hope that he will sparkle, impress on us the fact that he has grasped all the imaginative suggestions, and say that he might be prepared to carry them forward, rather than laying the dead hand of officialdom and bureaucracy on them, as is, regrettably, all too often the way. This is a bit of a challenge to the Minister. We have put the suggestions forwardI am happy to support themand rather than dismissing them out of hand, I hope that he will give us some encouragement and indicate that he will be prepared to consider them, perhaps through pilot schemes or experiments, so that when we come into government, we can report back to the House that they have been successful.

David Jamieson: I shall endeavour to sparkle this afternoon, as suggested by the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth). I agreed with the points made by the right hon. Member for East Yorkshire (Mr. Knight) at the start of his speech when he said that we want better use of our roads and bus lanes. I did not quite follow his argument about buses in East Yorkshire, however, because when I was last there, I did not see many bus lanes in some of the rural areasthey were mainly in more urban areas. Perhaps he will inform the House where they are. He will know the area far better than I do.
	The arguments that we have had today were well rehearsed in Committee, and I am delighted that we are hearing them again today. Bus lanes are generally provided to enable buses to avoid the queues that occur in congested road networks. The higher carrying capacity of buses means that the lanes make efficient use of road space in terms of moving people, and the quicker and more reliable journey times that follow make buses a more attractive and realistic option, thus further relieving pressure on the road network. The more other vehicles are allowed to use bus lanes, the more the purpose and effectiveness of those lanes is devalued.
	New clause 4 would effectively turn all bus lanes into high-occupancy vehicle lanes. It is easy to envisage that bus lanes would become choked by other traffic and that the presence of other vehicles in a bus lane would encourage the drivers of single-occupancy vehicles or those carrying just one passenger to use the lane as well. That would delay buses and lead to enforcement problems.
	The right hon. Member for East Yorkshire talked about using new technology such as cameras to enforce bus lanes. Of course, cameras can be used to distinguish between buses and other vehicles, but there is considerably more difficulty in distinguishing whether a car has one, two or three occupants, as the new clause would require. That is why the enforcement of high-occupancy vehicle lanes in Leeds and south Gloucester relies on a police presence and the ability to stop vehicles apparently contravening the rules. There was a complaint from one lady who had a small child strapped in the back of her car who, of course, was not visible to the police officer from outside the car. There are difficulties and anomalies in trying to enforce such rules.
	I recognise that, in the right place, high-occupancy vehicle lanes can be an effective traffic management measure, and the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst will be pleased to know that, later this year, my Department will be publishing guidance to authorities on the implementation of such lanes. Who knows, in the very long term, when the right hon. Gentleman and I are well retired, there may be a Conservative Government implementing some of these plans.

Greg Knight: rose

David Jamieson: I was just coming to the right hon. Gentleman's point about high-occupancy vehicle lanes, but I will give way.

Greg Knight: We welcome what the Minister said about issuing guidance. Will it be general guidance that, in effect, updates what is now the seven-year-old guidance on bus lanes? The hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) raised an interesting point. The original guidance referred only to heavy goods vehicles using bus lanes in some cases, and there may be a case for short-run delivery vehicles being included as well. Will the guidance be all-embracing?

David Jamieson: The guidance will relate to high-occupancy vehicles.
	I do not have the experience of the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst of travelling in the United States of America, but I think that I have travelled on the road outside Seattle to which he referred. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody), I noticed that it was rather wider than even the widest motorways in this country. I noticed also that it had no bus lane but rather a high-occupancy vehicle lane, whereas the new clauses relate to bus lanes, which are mainly in confined urban areas that in no way equate to the great intercity highways of the USA. Interesting though his point was, it does not easily read across to this country.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich made an interesting point about the problem for milk floats and other service providers. The milk float in my area arrives at 4 am, making a considerable noise and usually waking me up at the same time. I accept that there is a problem, because for people who find it difficult to get to the shops those deliveries are a lifeline. Delivery companies also provide employment. She asked if I would go away and think hard. I certainly shall, as long as she does likewise. I would be happy to put our brains together to find a solution.

John Redwood: rose

David Jamieson: The right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) is offering to join us in a troika to solve the problem.

John Redwood: Has the Minister thought about bus lanes' hours of operation, because milk floats often go out early, so they may not conflict with the frequent service provided by buses? Is it not possible to make the bus lane inoperable early in the morning so that delivery vehicles can use it?

David Jamieson: Again, I find myself agreeing with the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, who is at odds with his Front Bench, as I believe that such things should be decided locally. Local authorities should work with local companies to see if we can accommodate such arrangements. In some areas, bus lanes are not required 24 hours a day, but it is important that local authorities make those decisions. The House will be surprised to learn that I do not favour the big state intervention that the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) advocated[Interruption.] I see that the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst agrees with me.

Gwyneth Dunwoody: Before we leave our unfortunate milkman, there is an added hazard when delivery vehicles are subject to a congestion charge. I am afraid that I do not have an instant answerI wish that I didbut I hope that we can find a way to assist small deliveries. Given the level of petty theft in urban areas, it is not possible to ensure that delivered goods are still there when people get up to collect them. It is a difficult but genuine problem.

David Jamieson: I accept that it is both difficult and genuine. Equally, if milk floats used bus lanes regularly, it could inhibit the flow of buses, and local people would have a view about that. There could also be a considerable hazardthe right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst said that buses would be weaving in and out of the next lane, which would create safety problems.

John Redwood: I do not know of any place that needs a 24-hour bus lane. Bus lanes are needed only in busy periods when there is a frequent bus service. Outside those hours, buses could easily use the outside lane, because there would not be a great number of other vehicles, allowing delivery vehicles to do their job.

David Jamieson: In certain parts of the countrythis is particularly true of London and big conurbationsthere are 24-hour bus lanes because buses run 24 hours a day. In the night, there is no need to lift the restriction on using bus lanes because the roads are reasonably clear of cars anyway. The real problem was identified by my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich. We need to address it, along with local authorities and suppliers to see if we can reach an accommodation. I cannot see an easy solution to the problem, and I do not believe that she can either. It has been drawn to my attention that, in an intervention on the right hon. Member for Wokingham, I referred to cycle lanes rather than bus lanes. I meant that that cycles were permitted to use bus lanes, but he probably inferred that.
	New clause 6 would require all with-flow bus lanes to be open to use by cycles, motor cycles, taxis and invalid carriages. It is unnecessary for cyclists, who already have a right to use with-flow bus lanes. The Secretary of State's consent would be required if a local authority wished to exclude cycles, but it is rarely requested or given. A small number of bus lanes may exclude cycles for safety reasons, for example where cyclists are encouraged to use a parallel cycle track rather than a narrow bus lane. If it could be provided that there was a cycle track as well as the bus lane, that would be a considerable advantage to the cyclist, but one has only to look at the roads in London and many other urban areas, including my constituency, to see that it would be almost impossible to provide a facility for a bus lane and a cycle track in the available space.
	As for motor cycles, taxis and invalid carriages, local authorities have the power to allow other vehicles to use bus lanes if they consider that that would be desirable. We believe that it should be left to the discretion of local authorities to decide whether any other classes of motorised traffic should be allowed to use any of their bus lanes, taking into account their local transport plans and specific objectives in creating those bus lanes. That cannot be done effectively by central Government.
	The right hon. Member for East Yorkshire mentioned the guidance on bus lanes in local transport note 1/97, Keeping Buses Moving. That acknowledges that there are circumstances in which it will be appropriate and desirable for other vehicles to use the bus lanes and gives guidance on assessing the effects on buses and other road users. I stress to the right hon. Gentleman that that is guidance, not instructions, to local authorities. I emphasise for the third or fourth time that it is important that, working within the guidance, local authorities make decisions appropriate to their own circumstances.
	Some local authorities have allowed motor cyclists to use bus lanes. That has raised concerns for the safety of other road users, particularly for cyclists and pedestrians. Before revising the guidance, we are awaiting the results of trials in London allowing motor cycles in bus lanes. It would be premature to give an unconditional recommendation that motor cycles should be able to use bus lanes, let alone to give them standard access.
	Generally, it is better for invalid carriages to use footways, rather than the carriageway, wherever that is possible. It is not a good idea to encourage such small, low-powered, slow-moving vehicles to use bus lanes. Apart from the danger of their being ridden over because the bus driver cannot see them in his mirrors, moving at a maximum speed of 8 mph they would considerably inhibit the flow of traffic behind them.
	The new clauses are not necessary in relation to cyclists, and in relation to the other vehicles, they would undermine the effectiveness of bus lanes by removing the right of local authorities to decide which other vehicles, if any, should be allowed to use bus lanes. I therefore ask that the motion be withdrawn.

Greg Knight: The Minister is on a roll this afternoon. We have enjoyed listening to him. He has been bold, helpful, and willing to listen to views expressed in the House and the points raised in the debate. Knowing how the Government Whips Office works, I should warn him that he is in danger of being shuffled off to another Department because he is being too helpful to the House.
	Before the Minister rose to speak, I wrote on a piece of paper what I intended to say to wind up this part of the debate: the guidance is seven years old, needs updating, is overcautious and restrictive, and the Government should update it. He guessed that that is what I intended to say, and I warmly welcome the fact that we are to get new guidance. I hope that he will put a copy in the Library so that right hon. and hon. Members can see it.
	Our main criticism of the guidance that is seven years old is that it leads local authorities to act too cautiously and not to consider innovations that may be suitable for the locality that they serve. My right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham referred to motor cycles being allowed to use bus lanes. Apart from Bristol, as far as I am aware, there is no part of the country where that is allowed. Although the guidance makes it clear that the decision can be made locally, at the end of paragraph 4.12 on motor cycles, it states:
	The Department recommends that motorcycles should not normally be permitted to use bus lanes.
	I hope that when the new guidance is issued, it will be more neutral in what it says to local authorities. It should point out the range of options that are available to them and allow them to make their own decisions.
	The hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Mr. Marsden) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) expressed concern about the policing of bus lanes where other vehicles are allowed to use them. That should not be a problem given the advent of new technologydigital cameras are better than the earlier analogue onesand a policy of unannounced and occasional policing. Policing a law by which certain motorists are not supposed to be in a vehicle unaccompaniedfor example, learner drivers are supposed always to have a qualified driver with themdoes not present a particular problem and, as camera imaging gets better and more buses have cameras inside, this should not be an insurmountable problem either.
	The draconian business motion leaves me with a dilemma: should I test the mood of the House or save 15 minutes of debating time to raise issues further down the amendment paper? In the light of the Minister's helpful response and the fact that he is to issue new guidance, which we warmly welcome, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.
	Motion and clause, by leave, withdrawn.

New Clause 5
	  
	Traffic Lights

'In exercising their network management duty, a local traffic authority (or, in London, Transport for London) shall be required to monitor all traffic lights in operation in their area and shall
	(a) ensure that all traffic lights operate on a traffic sensitive basis during non-rush hour periods;
	(b) require that traffic lights are set to achieve the most expeditious flow of traffic and pedestrians at all times they are operational;
	(c) require that unless there are good reasons for not so doing that traffic lights at junctions with low traffic volumes operate in amber warning mode in all directions during non-rush hour periods.'.[Mr. Greg Knight.]
	Brought up, and read the First time.

Greg Knight: I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
	New clause 8Network management duty
	'In exercising their network management duty, the local traffic authority shall be required to ensure:
	(a) that all traffic lights operate on a traffic sensitive basis during non rush hour periods,
	(b) traffic lights are set to achieve the most expeditious flow of traffic and pedestrians at all times they are operational,
	(c) that traffic lights give longer green phases to main roads than to side roads and give continuous green phases to main roads during quiet times of the day and night, save where the traffic sensors recognise traffic on approaching side roads.'.

Greg Knight: I cannot think of a single factor that induces road hypertension more than having to stop at a set of traffic lights at a junction on a main road only for no traffic to emerge from a minor road and no pedestrians to seek to cross. Yet that happens in every city in the United Kingdom every day during non-rush hour periodsit certainly happens on the streets around this building. Traffic lights should be responsive to the flow of vehicles on our roads. If they are not, we end up with unnecessary tailbacks, which are far too common in our urban areas. Indeed, on most occasions when I leave this place at an early hour, I find that I am, along with other motorists, obliged to stop and wait at traffic lights that are showing red, only for no vehicles to cross the junction. There must be a better way of operating traffic lights. Unnecessary red lights add to pollution, add extra time to people's journeys and add to congestion.
	Does the Minister know what percentage of traffic lights are capable of operating in traffic-sensitive mode? Wherever new traffic lights are installed or old ones refurbished, there should be some requirement on those responsible to install traffic lights that can operate on a traffic-sensitive basis.

John Redwood: I hope that my right hon. Friend would not limit traffic sensors to new traffic lights, but would want retrospective fitting to take place as soon possible, because many would benefit from it.

Greg Knight: I agree with my right hon. Friend. I was trying, in the first instance, to find out from the Minister whether, as a matter of good practice, it is a requirement that all new traffic lights are capable of operating on a traffic-sensitive basis. I hope that he will confirm that that is the case.
	I hope that the Minister agrees that traffic lights should never be operated in a fashion other than to ensure the most efficient movement of traffic and pedestrians at a road junction. A report that appeared in the Evening Standard on 2 February this year refers to a particular set of lights in London and challenges its readers:
	Have you found a worse set of lights? . . . Situated at the junction where The Mall meets Trafalgar Square, they are responsible for some of the most notorious tailbacks in town. The reason is obvious to anyone who has sat in the ever-lengthening queue of cars trying to get to Trafalgar Square: they simply do not stay green for long enough.
	The report continues:
	We studied the lights on different working days, at different times, and found: the lights changed from red to green every one minute and eight seconds; the lights stayed on green for only eight seconds each time.

Eric Forth: I know that my right hon. Friend has driven quite a lot in the United States, as have I. He will know that in many states a driver is allowed to turn right at a red traffic light, provided that he is satisfied that the road is clear. Does my right hon. Friend think that we should carefully consider the idea of allowing people to turn left at red traffic lights in this country, to help partially to solve the problem that he describes?

Greg Knight: I agree. We floated that idea in Committee, and if my right hon. Friend examines new clause 5(c), he will see that it seeks to introduce another innovative measure from the United States: setting traffic lights that control low-density traffic flows to flash amber in all directions at non-rush hour periods, in effect signalling to motorists from all directions to cross the junction with care.
	The report in the Evening Standard points out that those particular lights have caused such anger and frustration in the film director Michael Winner that he
	has pledged to stand for Mayor of London on the single issue of getting them changed.
	The RAC Foundation, when asked to comment, said of the lights:
	Having just eight seconds for motorists to squeeze through means that they are so frustrated they end up jumping red lights.
	I presume that that refers to other red lights.

John Redwood: On that crucial point, would my right hon. Friend use his considerable powers of persuasion to suggest to the Conservative candidate for Mayor of London that if he took up that popular policyboth on the specific lights at the approach to Trafalgar square and on the more general problemhe would win many votes?

Greg Knight: I think that if I strayed too far into my conversations with the Conservative candidate for Mayor of London, you would call me to order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. However, may I just say that in all my conversations with Steven Norris on this matter, I have found him helpful and willing to listen? I think that he will take note of the points made in this debate.
	A report in The Daily Telegraph on 10 February last year said:
	Traffic congestion in London is costing business about 3.4 million a day, according to calculations by the London Chamber of Commerce, and conditions are getting worse. But business analysts point out that the jams are not being caused by more vehicles coming into London. Indeed, the AA's figures suggest there are actually fewer cars in central London now than there were 20 years ago . . . There has, however, been a sharp increase in the number of traffic lights, and in some parts of central London they are now on average only 80 yards apart. In addition, the timing of 170 of the 562 traffic lights in the central ring has been altered to slow the traffic even further.
	That is the main complaint that new clause 5 seeks to address.
	I do not know whether the Minister has made any studies of the situation in America to which I have referred, but we should be prepared to look at schemes that are in place in other countries, and embrace those that work. I have seen no evidence that the amber flashing system, which the Americans use regularly in non-rush hours, has led to an increase in the number of accidents. I hope that the Minister will be prepared to reflect on that, and perhaps give the go-ahead to a pilot scheme somewhere in the United Kingdom if he does not feel able to accept new clause 5.
	I hope that the Minister will respond positively to the new clause, whose sole aim is to reduce congestion. It does not seek to put pedestrians at risk, but has one aim only: congestion busting. I therefore hope that he will welcome it.

John Redwood: I rise to support new clause 5, tabled by my right hon. and hon. Friends, and to speak to my parallel new clause 8. I shall highlight the differences between them, but there are also many similarities. Both are designed to get traffic flowing more freely again.
	As my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Mr. Knight) has ably pointed out, the position in London is particularly chronic. There has been a deliberate attempt by the highways authorities to block and slow the traffic. We have seen reduced green phases and increased red phases at many sets of traffic lights, and the introduction of a large number of additional traffic lights, some of which are unnecessary or undesirable. In the centre of London, we now also have traffic lights with the new feature of an all-red phase, which means that traffic coming to the junction from each direction has to sit there looking at all the other stationary traffic. Let us imagine the cost of that in terms of fumes, frustration, pollution and inconvenience. There are often no pedestrians wishing to cross those roads at the time of the all-red phase.
	I am mainly a pedestrian in central London. I bring my car in on a Monday morning, and I leave it here until my duties are finished. I do not try to drive round the centre of London in my car. I normally walk, because I find that that is the quickest mode of travel, now that the traffic system has been wrecked and the underground functions so badly. So I look at this situation from a pedestrian's point of view, but I cannot say, as a pedestrian, that I want all-red phases. I often do not want to wait for the red phase at all, and I would not do so if it were safe for me to cross. It is perfectly reasonable for pedestrians at busy junctions to have to row in with the traffic light system, just as vehicles do, so that the pedestrians cross the road during the red phase. If they wished to cross again in a further direction, which is unusual, they would also have to wait for a red phase there, so that it would be safe to cross.
	The new clauses are designed to deal with the inconvenience created by the prevalence of red phases over green phases, and particularly to tackle the new injustice of the all-red phase, which does not help or amuse me as a pedestrian and which is extremely frustrating to all those who need or have to drive around London. It is particularly frustrating to all those carrying out their trade, using a van, milk float or other commercial vehicle. They have to use their vehicles because the tools and stock of their trade are inside them. Those people now have to sit at traffic lights for a great deal of the day, which increases prices, reduces efficiency, annoys people who live near the road blocks, and increases the amount of pollution.
	New clause 5 proposes that
	all traffic lights operate on a traffic sensitive basis during non-rush hour periods.
	If properly implemented, that measure would make an immediate improvement. We all have experience of travelling round busy towns and cities in the evening or the early morning, and of having to sit at red traffic lights when there is nothing moving in the other direction. Proper traffic sensors on the lights would remove the inconvenience, the congestion, the pollution, the delays, and the extra noise and fumes for people living nearby.
	The second part of the new clause proposes that
	traffic lights are set to achieve the most expeditious flow of traffic and pedestrians at all times they are operational.
	That addresses directly the question of whether there should be all-red phases. The answer is that there should not, and that there should be a sensible balance between the needs of the different road users and roads coming into the junction. We need to balance the needs of pedestrians and vehicles, and to make a decision as to which is the major road and which is the minor, giving sensible priority in most cases to the major road.
	The third part of new clause 5which differs markedly from my proposal in new clause 8proposes that, unless there are good reasons for not doing so,
	traffic lights at junctions with low traffic volumes operate in amber warning mode in all directions during non-rush hour periods.
	I could live with that proposal. Traffic sensors changing the lights from red to green or green to red, as appropriate, in response to traffic demand would be even safer and easier, so I would favour that option. However, if my right hon. and hon. Friends want to press new clause 5 to a vote, I should be happy to support it, because the intention is good. People would, however, have to be a bit more careful, because there could be traffic approaching a junction on amber from both directions. We would also need a sensible definition of low volume, so that the opportunities for conflict were reduced. 5.15 pm
	That brings me to my new clause 8, which contains the provisions
	that all traffic lights should operate on a traffic sensitive basis
	and that all traffic lights should be
	set to achieve the most expeditious flow of traffic and pedestrians.
	The other feature of my new clause, instead of the amber flashing mode, is that
	traffic lights give longer green phases to main roads than to side roads and give continuous green phases to main roads during quiet times of the day and night, save where the traffic sensors recognise traffic on approaching side roads.
	I submit that that is a safer variant than the amber flashing lights.
	In most cities and towns, there is a clear main roadthe A-road, the trunk road or the main route that goes through the principal settlement or links the connected settlements that form a great cityand a series of side roads intersect with the main route. Where that is clear, surely the highways authority should programme the traffic lights to give priority off-peak, all the time, to the busier main road, with the proviso that there should be a traffic sensor so that people are not stranded on the intersecting side roads for ever. In many cases, they would get early change to green if the traffic flows permitted that on the main route. That would be much fairer: it would reduce frustration as well as the need to burn so much petrol, change down and come to a halt, often with the engine running, while people wait for what seems like a long time late at night for the lights to change.
	There we have it. There are two parallel proposals on the table. One, influenced more by the United States, involves the amber flashing light; the other is influenced more by the British tradition of using the technology of traffic sensors. The Minister may argue that there would be a cost involved in installing traffic sensors in traffic lights. I quite agree, but it would be modest compared to the huge sums spent on obstacles and blocks to traffic in recent years. Most road users would think it was money well spent.
	I recommend that it be assumed that, over a reasonable period, that cost would get us up to modern traffic management standards. The savings in terms of less congestion, less fuel burned, less frustration, less delay and less cost to business would be considerable.
	The Minister may also say that he favours local autonomy in that respect as in others. I would find that easier to believe if we did not have before us this Bill in this shape. The Bill is about establishing national standards of traffic management and investigating how well local authorities do. It is about, in extreme cases, moving in and taking over traffic management duties if the local authority has failed.
	I am offering the Minister a way to ensure that local authorities, in more cases than not, succeed in improving traffic flows and busting congestion so that he does not have to make a heavy-handed intervention, which he will be entitled to do if the Bill is passed. So, far from my proposals being an additional blow to local autonomy, they could be a buttress to sensible local autonomy, which would mean that fewer local authorities got into the danger zone on their traffic management practices and had to face the extreme intervention of the whole system being taken out of their hands to be run by somebody else.
	The Government and local authorities seem to be interested in the use of technology to advise, warn, marshal and control traffic. I am recommending an old and well-established technology that would do the job at a relatively modest price and relatively simply. I have been trying to persuade my local authority, which is keen to get traffic moving and bust congestion, to change the phasing of lights. It has been obliging in many cases and is conducting an exercise at the moment, junction by junction.
	The authority is discovering that it can improve the capacity of leading congested junctions in the district quite substantially, simply by changing the phasing and timing of lights. If traffic sensors are added, the effect is even betterparticularly off-peak when there is no need to hold up the traffic on principal routes. I recommend that the Government adopt a scheme along the lines of new clause 8 and have pleasure in supporting my right hon. and hon. Friends in new clause 5.

Tony McNulty: I cannot recall whether I raised the Mall-Whitehall issue in Committee but a greater propensity for green lights at that particular junction would only move the delay elsewhere. It is part of a network rather than an individual set of lights. In a network, one cannot look at each traffic light junction in isolation. That would be simplistic and unworkable. TFL informs me that pedestrian flows after the pedestrianisation of the northern part of Trafalgar square are rooted in road safety.
	All the points made on both new clauses were germane and fair. I may agree with some but not with others. The right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) was ahead of me when he said that such matters are for local determination, not for the Bill in the first instance. New clause 5 seeks to extend the network management duties of local traffic authorities to the monitoring of all traffic lights in their areasbut ensuring that traffic light sets are working correctly to achieve the expeditious movement of all traffic would be one strand of a local traffic authority's management traffic duties, as set out in clause 16.
	The term traffic explicitly includes pedestrian. We had that debate at length in Committee. Considering expeditious traffic flows in the context of traffic lights purely in isolation is not sufficient; that is a fundamental flaw in both new clauses. Traffic flows must be viewed in the wider context of the network management duties that permeate the entire Bill
	At first, I inadvertently misled the Committee. I was still in pre-Greater London Authority mode when I stated that the transport operational command unit managed traffic lights in Londonwhich it did before the GLA. Subsequently, that duty fell to TFL. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Christchurch for allowing me to correct that error.
	New clause 5 would place a requirement on traffic authorities to ensure that all traffic lights be at optimum settings at all times during which they are operational. No one would disagree with that general objective, but we dispute the means. The majority of traffic lights in the UK are responsive to traffic flow changes and allocate green times proportionately to vehicle flow and the needs of pedestrians. Lights can also have different settings to cater for rush hour and non-rush hour periods, to achieve the expeditious and safe passage of vehicular and pedestrian traffic. We will include advice in the guidance on network management techniques that will be issued under clause 18, so there is no need to incorporate that requirement in the Bill.
	There is mixed experience from America. I can say from my 18 months in America, principally as a student, that for every four-way flashing amber junction there are about 10 four-way stop junctions with no lights. That practice is rooted in America's highway culture, especially in urban areas. They eschew the need for roundabouts, and although there are examples of four-way-flashing amber junctionsto which I will return in momentit must be pointed out that that is not the only model used, as four-way stops are a far more regular occurrence in those areas.
	Furthermore, the new clause would make it a requirement that during non-rush-hour times traffic lights should operate on flashing amber warning mode at traffic junctions with low traffic volumes. As I think we said in relation to the wider context of traffic lightsnot specifically on flashing amber warning modethat proposal would seriously compromise vehicular and pedestrian safety, and it must be discussed in the context of pedestrians and their safety as well as that of vehicular flow. Flashing amber already has a specific meaning at pelican crossingsthat a driver may proceed if no pedestrians are crossingand such an amendment would cause danger and confusion if it had another meaning at a junction. Flashing amber would not in any case be suitable at many junctions where buildings or road layout prevent drivers from seeing whether other vehicles are approaching the junction.
	As for pedestrians, although I cheerfully admit that the right hon. Member for Wokingham is fit, active and sprightly, not every pedestrian in a London context, or any other context, is, and we must legislate for safety for all, from the fittest to the most vulnerable, in terms of road safety. Pedestrians, especially the most vulnerable, will have no crossing facilities and will find crossing the road neither convenient nor safe at non-rush-hour times. As I am sure I said in Committee, blind and partially sighted pedestrians would no longer be able to rely on audible and tactile signals to cross safely, as flashing amber would necessitate removal of those facilities. It would be contrary to long-established UK practice, and unsafe, to signal pedestrians to cross when there are conflicting traffic movements. A better solution is to ensure that signals operate, wherever possible, in a responsive way so that drivers are only stopped when there is a conflict with other vehicle or pedestrian movements. At quiet times, signals need only operate to stop traffic if a pedestrian has operated the push button. I repeat, however, that all this needs to be seenas we said constantly in Committeein the wider context of the balance between pedestrians, safety considerations, vehicular flows and road traffic. Isolating this aspect will ultimately undermine the essence of the network management duty.
	New clause 8 has been described as similar to new clause 5, but it omitsto be fair to itthe dangerous proposal that traffic lights should operate in flashing amber mode in all directions at traffic lights with low volumes of traffic during non-rush hour periods. The new clause proposes that traffic lights give longer green phases to main roads than to side roads and continuous green phases to main roads during quiet times of day and night, except where the traffic sensors recognise traffic on approaching side roads. That is essentially a description of how responsive traffic lights should operate in most situations, and it is generally what we want to happen in practice.
	I repeat that I am not condemning right hon. and hon. Members on the Conservative Benches for the substance of what they suggest. Many of these things should be a matter of course in terms of achieving the network management duty, and should be reflected in the guidance indicated in the relevant clause18, I think. As I said, however, it is an area best suited to guidance, not legislation, as local authorities are best placed to determine the operation of traffic lights in the light of local conditions, as I believe the right hon. Member for Wokingham was suggesting that his authority is now doing.
	The proposal would, for example, prevent authorities from installing traffic light systems that revert to all-red in the absence of any demands, for example, late at night. In many instances, despite the complete aversion to all-red phases of the right hon. Member for Wokingham, they assist traffic flowwhen they are traffic sensitive, they change as soon as a vehicle approaches, and they can do so within seconds. The balance must be struck in relation to starting at an all-red phase. In the context of road safety, therefore, if a pedestrian comes along, they can cross safety and take preference. It is therefore not always the case that all-red phases are counter to the needs, desires, freedomsor whatever else one wants to suggestof the motorist.
	This type of system has been successful in reducing the incidence of certain kinds of accident, and is also very responsive when the first demand is received, whether from a vehicle or from a pedestrian. Where suitable, it enables whoever arrives at the lights firstmotorist or pedestrianto receive the fastest possible response.
	The new clause would also have the immediate effect of making fixed-time systems unlawful during non-rush hour periods, including systems with varying times depending on the time of day. Local authorities with vehicle-activated traffic light systems could also be in breach of the provision if the vehicle detectors failed during non-rush hour periods, because such systems are designed to revert to fixed-time operation.
	I am happy for the substance of the new clause to be discussed in more detail when we consider techniques relating to network management. As for a point that is not part of the substance but was raised in Committee, the ability to turn left at red lightsI see that being done successfully all the time when I am in France during the summer, and also in America, although of course those are right-hand turnsmay have some merit at some junctions. Giving carte blanche at all junctions, however, could conflict with prevailing road safety systems.
	Given the assurance that the substance of the new clausesbut not the four-way flashing amber phasemay be worthy of consideration, and the assurance that the network management duty and associated guidance will cover traffic light operation, I hope that, in the spirit of what has been a wonderful debate so far, Members will not press them to the vote following an extremely generous and forbearing double act on the Government Front Bench.

Greg Knight: What a contrast between the two Ministers! The hon. Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Mr. Jamieson) listened to, and accepted, most of our arguments. The hon. Member for Harrow, East (Mr. McNulty) tried to get in on his hon. Friend's coat tails by pretending that he was Mr. Reasonable as well. He is not. He appeared still wearing his Government Whip's uniform, and I am afraid that merely saying that some of our points may be worthy of consideration is not good enough. We wanted him to give a commitment that he would look at our proposals as a matter of urgency. Of course we accept that just changing one traffic light will not solve the problem, but what we need is guidance that those who set the timing of the lights are obliged to follow, the intention being to improve traffic flows.

John Redwood: The facts are simple. Before the lighting phases were changed, the traffic flowed well; as soon as they were changed, it did not. If the Minister is right in saying that other traffic lights are gummed up as well, we are not stopping him from changing them allbut he must change the really difficult one, which is the one identified by my right hon. Friend.

Greg Knight: My right hon. Friend is correct, and we have heard no realistic indication from the Minister today that he appreciates the scale of the problem, or is willing to grasp it. I realise that in a moment he will probably look over his shoulder expecting salvation from his troops in the approaching Division, but let me tell him that there is a bigger army out therean army of angry, over-taxed motorists sitting in congested queues of traffic that need not exist. It is that army, which is bigger than his parliamentary army, that will sweep this Government from office in 2005.
	I wish to test the mood of the House.

Question put, That the clause be read a Second time:
	The House divided: Ayes 167, Noes 279.

Question accordingly negatived.

Clause 9
	  
	Removal of Certain Vehicles by Traffic Officers

Christopher Chope: I beg to move amendment No. 2, in page 5, line 19, at end insert
	'(3) When exercising any powers made under provisions referred to in subsection (1), and before arranging for the removal of a broken-down vehicle, a traffic officer shall, when this can be done without compromising safety or unreasonably impeding traffic-flow
	(a) grant the driver of the vehicle, where present, a reasonable opportunity to contact a breakdown organisation or other service provider of their choice, and if that organisation confirms to the traffic officer that it will attend the broken-down vehicle as soon as practicable, then the traffic officer shall allow that organisation a reasonable period in which to attend the aforesaid vehicle; or
	(b) where the driver of the broken-down vehicle is not a member of a breakdown organisation, take into account any wishes of the driver with regard to attendance on the relevant vehicle and accede to such wishes where this would fulfil the purpose or purposes specified in section 5(3).'.
	The amendment would prevent up to 10 million customers of the Royal Automobile Club, the AA, Green Flag and other motoring organisations from effectively being short-changed as a result of the changes proposed in part 1 of the Bill. Assurances have been sought from the Government on this issue, with which the Minister is familiar. Ministers made it clear on Second Reading and in Committee that they do not want the result that motoring organisations fear will flow from the Bill. There is one way in which matters can be satisfied, which is for the Minister to accept this amendment.
	The amendment is a modification of what was proposed in Committee. It specifically incorporates the qualification that motoring organisations would not have the right to attend to their customers if, by so doing, they would compromise safety or unreasonably impede traffic flow. In all other circumstances, the customer of a motoring organisation who had broken down on the hard shoulder of a motorway would be able to phone up to call that organisation to attend to his or her needs. The amendment is particularly important for disabled groups and we know that the Disabled Drivers Association strongly supports it.

David Kidney: Briefly, I spoke on Second Reading in support of co-operation between the Highways Agency and recovery operators of the sort that currently obtains between the police and those operators. It is disappointing, all these months later, that the necessary talks have still not happened. I have a copy of the memorandum of understanding between the Association of Chief Police Officers and the operators, so why on earth can we not now have a tripartite understanding between the police, the Highways Agency and the operators?
	This is an important issueand not just because 90 per cent. of the activity is already carried out by the operators. It would be iniquitous if all the people who were members of motoring organisations were denied the use of those operators' services. The Minister would become unpopular if people started getting bigger bills for the removal of their vehicles from the motorway roadside than they would if their operator had turned up.
	A constituent recently contacted me about his experiences. It was not a motorway case, but the Minister may be interested to know that the Highways Agency arranged for a private operator to turn up and remove a little bit of oil from the road, for which my constituent was charged 600. The Highways Agency will lose control over the costs. How much better if there were co-operation between the Highways Agency and the operators who have the skills and abilities to work with that agency on a collaborative basis. That would be more efficient, more time-saving and certainly less costly.

John Redwood: I rise to support my hon. Friend on his important amendment. I find it extraordinary that the Government want to do so much damage to well established motoring organisations such as the Royal Automobile Club and the Automobile Association, and to deny motorists their choice and opportunity[Interruption.] The Minister protests, but he has only to read the reasonable words of the amendment, which make it clear that we wish to
	grant the driver of the vehicle, where present, a reasonable opportunity to contact a breakdown organisation or other service provider of their choice.
	Why does the Minister object to that, which seems such a reasonable thing to do? If he does object, as seems to be the case, I presume that, if we had enough time left, he would recommend that his hon. Friends voted the amendment down. That must mean that he has no time for the AA and the RAC, and that he would like them to be displaced by the expensive monopoly proposals in the Bill.
	I do hope that the Minister will think again. I shall not develop my argument further, because I want to hear his reply in the hope that, even at this last moment, he might have seen the folly of his ways and grant us leave to add the amendment to the Bill.

Brian White: One of the reasons provided by several organisations to explain their concerns is their fear of a change of Government. I would certainly endorse that. The real danger with the Bill is that we end up with a Tory Government. I wholly concur, and any sensible person would also be fearful of that possibility.
	There remain some genuine concerns about the need to ensure that the breakdown companies remain competitive, and that there is a national competitive framework governing the operation of the various providers. There is concern that the Bill's reasonable provisions are not so open-ended as they appear. The discussions need to be brought to a conclusion. I believe that the memorandum of understanding should become tripartite and that that should happen as quickly as possible. The Government should reiterate the assurances that the breakdown industry is seeking.

David Jamieson: Again, these issues were rehearsed at length in Standing Committee. In case there is no time later, I want to make it clear that this Government hold this country's recovery organisations in high regard. The AA, RAC and Green Flag, to name but three, give their members an excellent service. The Government have absolutely no intention of supplanting the excellent work of those organisations. I hope that that reassures the Opposition, who seem hellbent on perpetuating a myth about the Government's intentions.
	Clause 9 paves the way for regulations to be made that will empower traffic officers to remove vehicles that are broken down or abandoned, or parked illegally, obstructively or dangerously. The framework set out in regulations under section 99 of the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984 already allows the police to remove vehicles in such circumstances. Opposition Members should be aware of that, as the measure was passed by a Conservative Government. The legislation works well, and so we intend to enable traffic officers to deal with the problem in a similar way.
	Vehicles that are broken down, damaged or abandoned represent a safety hazard, especially on motorways and other high-speed roads. They can cause congestion and pose risks to road safety. It is essential that those vehicles can be removed quickly in the interests of the safety of any occupants and of other road users. Motorway hard shoulders and dual carriageway verges are dangerous places, and there are still too many fatalities and serious accidents involving stranded vehicles. It is therefore vital that traffic officers have the ability to require the removal of a stationary vehicle.
	Amendment No. 2 would constrain the ability of traffic officers to sort things out. Over time, those officers become very experienced in assessing such situations, but the amendment would impede their discretion to have a vehicle removed. In practice, that could result in an increasingly dangerous situation: the removal of a vehicle from a hazardous location could be delayed while discussions were held on how long it might take a breakdown organisation to come along, or whether a friend was going to come to the driver's assistance.
	On a busy motorway, with a vehicle in a dangerous position, that would clearly be totally unacceptable. I fully understand the concerns of the recovery organisations and their members that they should not to be subjected to over-zealous removal by the authorities, but that has not happened to date and there is no reason to believe that it will happen in the future.
	Who is in the best position to judge an appropriate course of action? That is a key question. Traffic officers are well trained and experienced professionals who know the network and the prevailing traffic conditions. They will understand more fully the risks inherent in various breakdown situations. They will be at the scene, and also will be in touch with the regional control centres that can provide information relating to conditions elsewhere on the road. They are in the best position to make a judgment on the most appropriate course of action, not the driver or the recovery operators.
	I emphasise again that the recovery organisations will be able to attend their members who break down on motorways and trunk roads, as they do now. For those drivers who are not members of a breakdown organisation, the recovery of their vehicles will be dealt with as it is now. That may include the use of police contracts to remove the vehicle from the motorway or trunk road.
	The Government are committed to an ongoing dialogue with the recovery industry to see how further improvements can be made to the way that breakdowns are dealt with on motorways and trunk roads. The Highways Agency is convening a working group to discuss issues of removal and disposal of vehicles, and representatives of the recovery industry will be invited to attend. I am told that the working group will meet next Friday, 26 March, to discuss those matters, and I know for certain that the AA and RAC wish to attend.
	In light of what I have said, I hope that the amendment will be withdrawn.

Christopher Chope: I will not withdraw the amendment because the Minister has not addressed ithe refers to hazardous situations, which it specifically excludes. Without it, the Highways Agency will be enabled to establish a monopoly roadside recovery service, which is not what anybody wants.

Question put, That the amendment be made:
	The House divided: Ayes 174, Noes 276.

Question accordingly negatived.
	It being after Six o'clock, Mr. Deputy Speaker proceeded to put forthwith the Questions necessary to dispose of the business to be concluded at that hour, pursuant to Order [5 January].

Clause 11
	  
	Uniform

Amendment made: No. 3, in page 6, line 12, leave out 'may' and insert 'shall'.[Mr. Jamieson.]

Clause 84
	  
	Financial Provisions

Amendment made: No. 4, in page 52, line 39, leave out
	'regulations under paragraph 3(3) of'
	and insert
	'an order under Schedule 3 to'.[Mr. Jamieson.]

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Consideration completed.
	Order for Third Reading read.

David Jamieson: I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Third time.
	I notice that we have three quarters of an hour in which to debate Third Reading, so that might give hon. Members the welcome opportunity to go to the Taste of Cornwall exhibition upstairs on the Lower Waiting Hall, which was organised by my hon. Friend the Member for Falmouth and Camborne (Ms Atherton). I enjoyed a lovely oyster and, I must say, a tiny drop of Skinner's Keel Over there. Anyone who wants to taste the fine fare of the west country should take the opportunity to do so.

Patrick McLoughlin: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I have just been reflecting on the words that you used at the end of the proceedings on Report. You said, Consideration completed. I realise that the use of those words is a long established practice, but will you reflect on whether it would be more appropriate to say, Time allocation completed? Consideration of these matters has certainly not been completed, because we did not reach many of the amendments. Under the arrangements for the modernisation of the House, the Chair ought to consider not saying consideration completed because that is misleading, as the Government's guillotine concluded the remaining stages of debate. Will you reflect on that for subsequent announcements?

Mr. Deputy Speaker: I am more than happy to reflect on that point of order, as I do on every point of order. The House will have heard the hon. Gentleman's remarks, but I am afraid that for the time being the words that I used must rest.

David Jamieson: Traffic managementthe way that we manage our roadsaffects all of us every day. The Bill will make sure that our road space is managed in the interests of road users, help us to get the most out of the investments that we make in our infrastructure, and cut out some of the unnecessary disruption that can clog up our roads.
	Notwithstanding what has just been said, I am glad that, in Committee, we made good progress within the time allocated. The time allocation worked well for the Committee, and the Bill has been given good scrutiny by Conservative and Liberal Democrat Members. Some elements have received widespread support on both sides of the House. I am pleased to say that, in general, debate has been constructive, and it has helped to shape Government policy. I thank all who contributed to the discussions, not just those who were in Committee, and who made useful and worthy contributionsso good, in fact, were some of the Opposition's contributions that they changed the Government's mind. When I was in opposition, that was rare. I thank the officials and those who support the Opposition. I know that there are many people in the backrooms of Members' offices who do a lot of work on Bills and get very little thanks from the public for doing so. I place on record my thanks to those people for their work.
	Transport and infrastructure are there to support the economy, and if our economy is to function properly, goods and people need to move efficiently. Keeping traffic moving can help to improve safety and reduce pollution, so reducing congestion will help us to achieve some of our other goals. Congestion is a symptom of economic prosperity, and notwithstanding what was said on Second Reading, we now have growing economic prosperity. There are more than 1.5 million more people in work than in 1997. That is more people who are travelling to work, and more people with money in their pocket to spend on going out for leisure. I welcome that; it is a good thing and it is part of being in a prosperous, democratic society.
	There are even more utilities digging up the roads, installing new services that we want and, of course, maintaining the vital infrastructure that lies beneath our roads.

John Redwood: There are also more highways authorities, local and national, messing up the roads. Will the Minister, at this late stage, guarantee that in another place the Government will move amendments to extend to them powers that will control their activities?

David Jamieson: From our debates, certainly in Committee, we know that such authorities are already included. It is for not only the utilities but the Highways Agency and the highways authorities to make sure that they do everything to avoid impeding the flow of traffic. In fact, the Bill gives new responsibilities both to the Highways Agency, through the traffic officers, and to local authorities through traffic managers, to make sure that traffic is kept moving safety in their areas.

Gwyneth Dunwoody: Reading the Bill carefully, I find that it is precisely the fact that it all the time confirms the need to keep traffic moving that worries me. Is the Minister satisfied not only that the powers to be given to the new group of traffic officers will be properly controlled, so that we know what they are and are not capable of doing, but above all, that the general public will understand why we have yet another group of people whose function seems to be limited but whose powers seem to be considerable?

David Jamieson: In time, the public will understand the role of traffic officers, who will begin to take up duty on our roads this year. Their task is to help to keep the traffic moving and ensure the safety of people on the network, which will be appreciated by the public. The Bill will not solve all our problems, but it complements our other policies. There will be more capacity where appropriate, as is happening on the M25. Billions of pounds will be invested in local transport improvements, and better use of new and existing capacity will make a difference. We need to manage both trunk roads and local roads properly, which is why the Bill gives the Highways Agency and local authorities the new powers that they need to do that job.
	On our trunk roads, 25 per cent. of congestion is caused by incidents. We will not stop all those incidents, but we can reduce the time taken to deal with them and cut out unnecessary congestion. The new traffic officer service will target new devoted resources on keeping traffic moving on our motorways, and will be a uniformed, dedicated, 24/7 force serving the motorist. It will make our motorways safer, give drivers better information and improve traffic flow. In short, the traffic officer service will be the motorist's friend.
	The Bill creates new powers for local authorities. Permit schemes and other provisions will put local traffic authorities in a stronger position to manage their roads. We are creating a realistic expectation that all local authorities will focus on managing their roads, as the best authorities are already doing. Creating new powers, however, is only part of the picture. Right hon. and hon. Members argued forcefully on Report and in Committee about many aspects of network management, authorities' own roadworks, the use of bus lanes and phasing of traffic lightsboth subjects of debate todayand speed limits, and humps, which my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) discussed in Committee. Powers are already in place to deal with such issues, but we agree that we need to make sure that they are being used properly with the right end in mind, which is why the new network management duty that we are giving to local traffic authorities is important. It is not just about doing things that are newwe need to make sure that everything else is controlled and working properly.
	The network management duty and the accompanying guidance for local authorities will focus attention on getting the right results. It will not, however, tell authorities what decisions they have to make to achieve those results. Authorities themselves are better placed than us to take those decisions. We are already making good progress. Ministers and officials are meeting key stakeholders to develop the guidance on the network management duty, and we are making similar progress with the secondary legislation stemming from parts 3 and 4. Even today, authorities and utilities are developing options for the creation of permit schemes, and I look forward to the results of their deliberations and seeing how we can make a difference to what happens on our roads.
	While this Bill is in the other place, we will work hard to make sure that its key measures deliver results for road users as soon as possible. Before the end of April, I expect the Highways Agency's traffic officers to be operating on the ground in the west midlands, and working with the police to keep traffic moving and to clear up after incidents. I look forward to the benefits that the service will deliver; to giving traffic officers their full powers when the Bill receives Royal Assent; and to the delivery of benefits in the north-west and south-east by spring 2005, and across the whole network by the end of next year.

Paul Marsden: I reiterate the general support of the Liberal Democrats for the Bill and its concepts. The Minister has outlined the benefits that it will bring about. How will they be measured? Will it be down to individual performance mechanisms and indicators for specific parts of the traffic officer service, or will it be down, ultimately, to reducing congestion, which should be the objective?

David Jamieson: There will be a combination of those aspects. We are setting targets for the traffic officers. It will be a matter of reducing congestion and dealing with incidents more rapidly than is currently the case. There will be measures of customer satisfaction to see whether people who use the roads value the service they get when, for example, a car has gone out of control or broken down in the fast lane of a motorway. Those are hazardous and worrying situations, and the traffic officers will be able to assist. We will judge them on the basis of their contribution.
	This is a new service, and we will see how the tasks and roles of traffic officers develop. Some will become more important than others and we will change the priorities accordingly. We want to learn from the west midlands experience as we roll that out to the rest of the country, to see what traffic officers do best and how they can best contribute to keeping our traffic moving safely and to the satisfaction of all motorists, whatever type of vehicle they drive.
	As the House knows, we are making good progress towards implementing other key measures. We expect to be able to issue guidance to authorities on the network management duty very soon after Royal Assent, so that we can focus immediately on bringing together all those strands in the authorities and on keeping traffic moving on the roads. Authorities will be given the necessary powers to control street works and road works as a priority. There will be full public consultation this summer on regulations for permit schemes. We want to see authorities using those powers effectively as soon as they are available.
	People want to know how our plans will affect them. I am pleased to say that the Bill will make a difference by supporting the economy, improving safety and reducing pollution. I therefore commend the Bill to the House.

Damian Green: As the House reaches the final stage of the Bill before it moves to another place, I pay tribute to colleagues in all parts of the House who have attempted manfully and occasionally successfully to improve it. The Minister graciously pointed out that he has taken on board some of the sensible suggestions made by my right hon. and hon. Friends, and we are delighted with that.
	On Second Reading, we moved a reasoned amendment. We accepted that we need to take steps to help drivers and others who use the road network, but we did not accept that the Government's proposals amounted to a coherent, well thought out strategy to solve the many problems on our roads that the Minister mentioned at the beginning of his speech. The central problem with the Government's approach to traffic management is incoherence. They cannot decide whether they regard the car as an evil or not. Their heart tells them, and many of their own Back Benchers tell them, that motorists are a bad thing whose lives need to be made miserable, but they accept that there are tens of millions of drivers in this country, many of whom rely on the car as an essential necessity for going about their daily business.
	It is our contention that those people should have their lives improved as much as possible by the traffic management network. That is what we have been seeking to do with our suggested changes to the Bill. The question facing us today, after the Committee and Report stages, is whether enough of the many persuasive arguments put by my right hon. and hon. Friends and by hon. Members in other parts of the House, including on the Government Benches, have been taken on board by Ministers. The answer, regrettably, is no. We have done our best to improve the Bill so that it genuinely meets the needs of road users, but Ministers have insisted on sticking to the bulk of their original plans, so the Bill is not yet in a fit state for us to support it. I hope that in another place it can be changed in those areas where it is deficient.
	All that despite the rather good start to the debate on consideration. We were entirely happy to support Ministers on their new clause on blue badges to help disabled people, and we paid tribute to Members on both sides of the House who lobbied for that. Then, Ministers graciously conceded that our ideas on civil enforcement and the need for statutory guidelines are sensible. We are delighted that they agreed to look again at the wide-ranging and ill defined powers that they have given traffic wardens to impose penalties on drivers of moving vehicles, and we hope that they will return with further sensible suggestions. It was good to hear Ministers admit that we were right about the need for statutory guidelines. Indeed, the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Mr. Jamieson), was praised for his flexibility. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, that was it for the rest of the day as far as common sense was concerned, and we got no more real agreement from the Government.
	Nevertheless, I hope that when the Government move their own amendments in another place we can support them, because this is a key issue for those who are concerned not only with traffic management, but with the wider issue of respect for the forces of law enforcement. One of the great problems of our age is the increasing breakdown of respect among the general population for the police and other law enforcement agencies; over-zealous civilian enforcement of traffic laws is a significant contributor to that.
	The second problematic aspect of the Bill is the permit scheme that the Government propose to foist on councils and the utilities. We had an extremely entertaining debatelargely conducted, it must be said, on this side of the Houseon the balance between those two good Conservative principles of low and honest taxation and local accountability. We came down on the side of low and honest taxation because, as the National Joint Utilities Group says, the Government's scheme will add 1.2 billion per annum to utilities' costs in building up their networks. That is why we suggested that the fee for any application for a permit or issue of a permit should not be higher than the administration cost incurred.
	The arguments over the extra 55 per household tax that the Government propose to impose were well rehearsed, and I will not go over them again. However, I invite Ministers to consider what happened in the experiments that they set up to test this type of system. The Halcrow report on the pilot schemes that were implemented in Camden and Middlesbrough showed that utilities did not change their practices under lane rental although they had to pay the charges. The objectivesto reduce journey times in Camden and to reduce delays in bus journeys in Middlesbroughwere not achieved, and the additional costs to the utilities in the 11 months of the pilots were 1.18 million in Camden and 862,000 in Middlesbrough. If Ministers looked at the evidence that they themselves commissioned, they would not be proceeding down this route. It is somewhat stubborn and pig-headed of them to persist with the scheme, and I assure them that we will continue our opposition in another place.
	The third area where the Bill is seriously deficient is in the effect on the breakdown services of the proposals on managing incidents on motorways. Ministers have fallen over themselves to provide assurances that they do not intend to damage the RAC, the AA and Green Flag, and did so again today. Sadly, they seem not to have read their own Bill, which permits the Highways Agency to establish a monopoly roadside recovery service funded by charges on motorists. Given Ministers' record on milking motorists, they should understand why bodies such as the AA and the RAC, which are of course supportive of improved incident management, are so concerned about the Bill. Ministers will probably not listen to Opposition parties, but perhaps they will listen to the motoring organisations, which, as has been pointed out, have 10 million members. The AA says:
	The Bill, as drafted, could not only enable the removal of motorists' existing right of choice of commercial provider but also remove the existing right of one motorist to stop and help another . . . Consumer protection issues also appear to have been overlooked because the Bill gives powers for charges to be set to create a revenue stream in the financial interests of the HA
	the Highways Agency
	or contractors.
	In other words, the body empowered to remove vehicles will be funded by the charges that it can make. I should have thought that that in itself would be enough to ring alarm bells with Ministers.
	The AA makes another good point, particularly apposite given our debate on blue badges and the needs of disabled drivers:
	The Disabled Drivers Association says that the special needs services provided by the major roadside recovery organisations are vital to hundreds of thousands of vulnerable drivers. It would neither make sense nor be acceptable to them to put these national services under threat.
	Ministers need to look again at those points.
	The RAC envisages:
	A needless doubling up of resources,
	because
	70 to 80 per cent. of our customers call for help from a mobile phone. This means that in many cases breakdown organisations will already have sent a recovery vehicle before the Highways Agency becomes involved.
	The RAC, too, is concerned about unfair charging of motorists and in particularthe Minister did not address this extremely good point at allthe second order effect, by which there will be a reduction in the number of motorists with breakdown cover. If people know that the Highways Agency has some kind of monopoly right on motorways, and will come along, charge them what it likes and take their cars away anyway, that will discourage them from joining the excellent breakdown organisations.

David Jamieson: I am not sure whether the hon. Gentleman was in the Chamber when we debated that on Report, but if so he would have heard me say that we hold the breakdown services in the highest regard and that the Government have no intention, through the Highways Agency or any other body, of supplanting their excellent work. There will be no incentive for people to leave the AA, the RAC or any other body under the second order to which the hon. Gentleman refers, because they will be charged for having their vehicle totally removed from the road. The only powers that we have transferred to traffic officers are those that the Conservative Government gave the police, back in 1984.

Damian Green: I was here, and I heard the Minister give those warm words, but he does not appear to have listened to the words of the organisations. The fact is that they do not believe him, and I am afraid that we are now at the stage of the decaying years of this Government when no one believes a word that they say. The Minister can reassure people until he is blue in the face, but it is quite clear that those hugely responsible, popular, important organisations have not been reassured. He has made exactly the same points on meetings taking place in a few weeks' time as he made on Second Reading, and he has not accepted any amendments drafted by those organisations and tabled by my right hon. and hon. Friends. I am therefore not surprised that they suspect his motives. The warm words that he keeps repeating are not backed up by any deeds. Until Ministers do something to help the emergency organisations, rather than just say how much they value them, they will not be credible on this point.
	Among the noteworthy aspects of today's debates were the warm tributes to local authorities and local power that the Minister kept paying. He will be aware, however, of the real concerns of local government about the centralising tendencies of the Bill as it stands, in particular about the powers to impose traffic directors on local authorities. The Bill does not state in what circumstances that might happen or what evidence the Government will have to produce to enable them to act in that way. It does not set a timetable for any review of arrangements in cases in which the Government have declared a local authority to have failed and have taken away its powers of traffic management[Interruption.] The Minister is sitting there chuntering, but he should perhaps talk to his colleagues in the Local Government Association, who made those points very strongly in the days leading up to this debate. He has not convinced even his Labour colleagues in the LGA: yet another group of people who can see that Ministers' words and deeds are completely out of sync.
	In amendment No. 1, which we did not reach, we suggested adding to statutory duty the need to keep the roads in good repair. My hon. Friend the Member for West Derbyshire (Mr. McLoughlin) made the good point that the Bill has therefore not completed its scrutiny. Surely it is a basic and sensible aspiration to ask local highways authorities to keep the roads in good repair. That is the sort of thing that should appear in a traffic management Bill, and it is a great shame that, because of the Government's habit of trying to shorten parliamentary scrutiny of their legislation, perfectly non-contentious and sensible ideas such as that in amendment No. 1 cannot even be debated in the House.
	So the Bill, which purports to help traffic flow and improve the conditions on our roads, has failed to achieve its objectives. It should have provided relief for congested streets and frustrated road users, but it is now clear that we shall have to wait for such useful legislation until the next Conservative Government. This Government have been waging war on the motorist since they came to power and, sadly, the Bill does not mark a ceasefire, as it was meant to. In its own terms, the Bill fails in its purpose, and I urge the House to reject it.

Gwyneth Dunwoody: Any traffic management scheme must be properly organised, and the Bill represents a sensible attempt to do exactly that. We desperately need to bring a bit of sense to the way in which we manage our road space in congested towns and villages and to accept that many different groups of people need to use what is a very limited space.
	I have one reservation about the Bill, however, and I would like to spend a minute putting it on record. The powers that it gives to traffic officers are very wide-ranging while not being tremendously precise. They also appear to present some difficulties. We are creating a new traffic police force without the full skills and abilities of true traffic policemen. We could easily have expanded the existing police forces to create a real traffic police force, if it were only the clogging up of motorways that was causing the difficulty. I hope that we shall not regret this decision in due course.

John Thurso: I see a number of other hon. Members waiting to speak, so I shall be brief. I pay tribute to all hon. Members who took part in our proceedings today and in Committee, which was certainly helpful to the Bill.
	I gave the Bill a pretty broad welcome on Second Reading. I said that its general principles were right, and that is still my view. I raised three points at that time, and I shall touch briefly on each of them now. The Minister mentioned the problems of congestion. They certainly impede our economy and add to emissions, which has a negative impact on the environment and on human health. The Bill is welcome in that it seeks to address those problems in general terms.
	We have talked about the timetable for the Bill, and it certainly proved adequate in Committee. The Bill received good scrutiny, and I pay tribute to the business managers for achieving that. I am also grateful to the Minister for mentioning the backroom staff on all sides; they do a good job. I appreciated the opportunity, as did my staff, to meet his officials to consider various aspects of the Bill. I have to say, however, that on Report, holding six short debates was perhaps not the best way to proceed. I am sorry that we did not get to the one debate that I would have liked to take part in, which was the one on my amendment.
	I expressed my concern on Second Reading that traffic officers and traffic managers might not have sufficient regard to safety. The Minister gave reassurances in Committee in that regard, which I was content to accept. I believe, from what he has said, that the commitment to road safety will be there. Another point that I raised with him, about which I am less certain, relates to environmental management, and to whether network managers will have sufficient regard to that issue. There is an imbalance between keeping traffic moving and what is best for the environment. It remains to be seen whether the Bill will look after what is required for the environment.
	One issue that we debated in Committee and failed to get to today was the London settlement in the Greater London Authority Act 1999 and how the powers that the Bill confers will relate to traffic directors and the Mayor. As the Bill stands, it removes the primacy of the Mayor on transport matters, by enabling traffic directors to override the Mayor's strategy and directions in relation to local implementation plans, and his directions to Transport for London. It therefore contains a major shift in the London devolution settlement. In Committee, the Minister said that it was not the Government's intention to unpick the devolution settlement, but further research has shown that that is precisely what they did, as the back-stop powers that they required were already available under clause 143 of the Bill that set up the Greater London authority. That matter may have to be dealt with in another place.
	Notwithstanding that fairly severe reservation and the other matters that I touched on, I believe that the principles of the Bill are correct. It is important that our traffic be kept flowing as freely as possible. My colleagues and I are content to support the Government in the Lobby.

Brian White: Consideration on Second Reading began with the Government responding positively to a letter that I wrote about the concerns of utility companies by setting up the working group. This afternoon, the Government accepted an amendment on the blue badge scheme that I tabled in Committee. I thank Ministers for their positive response throughout.
	Having said that, I raised a number of other concerns in Committee regarding the permit scheme and road safety that Ministers need to continue to take on board during the ongoing consultation. The assurances that they gave in Committee on how those concerns will be dealt with in the ongoing discussions are important, particularly those on network management having a duty to deal with road safety issues.
	It is important to get the balance right between utilities and local authoritiesthat has been mentioned todayand in the co-ordination of street works. I welcome the assurance that the Government gave in Committee that start-up companies will not find themselves at an unfair disadvantage over the works that are essential for the growth of our economy. I appreciate that the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) will want to endorse that.
	The traffic forum proposals should be taken forward. Also, the involvement of stakeholders in drawing up the regulations and, in particular, the need for joined-up government, are important. It is not only the Department for Transport that should be involved.
	The Bill is a useful step forward and I urge Ministers, as they take the consultation forward, to take on board the real, underlying concerns that gave rise to a number of amendments that were considered in Committee.

John Redwood: Previous Transport Ministers under this Government worked on the assumption that 30 million motorists must be wrong. If the motorists were not wrong, they would impose rules, regulations and new restrictions to ensure that they were, and then charge them for it.
	The latest Secretary of State and his ministerial team offered us something better. We were told that they had seen the light: they had come to realise that most people most of the time make their journeys by car, that most goods move by van or lorry, and that however successfully we improve railways and other public transport modesthis Government have been singularly unsuccessful in thatwe are unlikely to get away from the fact that the overwhelming majority of longer journeys are undertaken by road vehicle.
	We entered into the spirit of the Bill expecting great things. Certainly, the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Mr. Jamieson) has been pleasant and agreeablefrom time to time, he has found merit in what the Opposition have saidso it is more in sorrow than anger that I have to say that I share the disappointment of my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Mr. Green), who sits on our Front Bench.
	I was expecting much more. I was told on Second Reading that several ideas that I had put forward had a lot to recommend them and would help to improve traffic flow, but I find that somehow they have not found their way into the Bill as yet. I live in hope, because in the other place, where there is a better voting balance, wiser heads may prevail. The Minister may take away from today's debates some better ideas that could be reflected in the Bill before it returns to the House.
	So many points need improving. Today, for example, the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) talked about important issues concerning delivery vehicles. She is worried about the lot of the milk float. It has to go out early in the morning and hazard its way round the bus lanes worrying about infringements and taxes being imposed on it if it intervenes by using the bus lane. The driver also has to worry about crossing the bus lane on foot, presumably after having parked in the middle of the highway. That is a ludicrous situation. The Minister agreed, but had no immediate solution. The milk float is one of many delivery vehicles that have to chance their arm with bus lane regulations. I hope that the Government will think again and understand the need for change. One possible solution is to alter the times at which bus lanes come into effect, so that early-morning deliveries can take place without difficulty. If we want to improve road capacity and reduce congestion, bus lanes should only operate at busy times of day, when frequent and regular bus services need to use them. It seems ridiculous to blank off half or one third of the highway on each side for the whole day when often no congestion warrants that intrusion or no buses are using that facility.
	We have attempted to address speed limits but without success. All of us believe that low limits should be imposed where vulnerable peopleparticularly children and the elderlymay be on or near the carriageway. At times when children are entering or leaving school, it makes sense to impose tight speed controls. They can also make a lot of sense when applied to busy roads in residential areas and near the homes of elderly people.
	It does not make sense to impose a series of varied speed limits30, 40, 50, 60 or 70 mphon main trunk roads through urban areas in a way that the motorist finds confusing. Often, lower speed limits are set than most motorists judge to be safe. Those arbitrary limits are buttressed with cameras as a way of collecting large sums of money from motorists who may not be aware that the limit has suddenly changed from 60 or 50 mph to 40 mph and have to make a contribution to the one-armed bandits in the sky.
	The Under-Secretary frowns, but an experienced motorist used to be able to judge the speed limit by the environment through which he or she was driving. If one was driving through a well-lit, built-up area one knew that the limit was 30 mph. A dual carriageway in an urban area meant a 40 mph limit. Anywhere else on a main highway meant a 60 mph limit in the case of a single carriageway and 70 mph for a motorway-type road.
	There is now a stunning array of different speed limits, particularly in urban areas. Experienced motorists cannot guess or judge but have to keep their eyes skinned to the side of the road to see the one signoften covered in mud, dirty and not easily recognisablewhen their eyes should be fixed on the road ahead, in case there is an unusual impediment. As a result, even law-abiding motorists often get caught out in areas they do not know well. There should be a much more rational approach. My hon. Friends on the Front Bench suggest a limit of 80 mph on motorways. In trying to observe, as I do, the 70 mph limit I am always in the slow lane and practically every other vehicle overtakes. If I broke the speed limit and got caught, that would make far too exciting a storyso like the Minister, I suspect, I try to behave myself. I notice that most of my constituents do not believe that the 70 mph speed limit is reasonable or sensible and regularly break it.
	Parking is another issue that we have debated but on which we have not succeeded in changing the Minister's mind. One reason why highway capacity is so limited is that many people at home and work and in town centres have to park their vehicles on the carriageway because planning rules do not make sufficient provision for parking, hard standing or garaging. That does not stop people owning and using cars but means that a large number of vehicles, when not in use, stand out on the highwayreducing the space available on a crowded highway network in a crowded island. I hope that Transport Ministers will talk to their planning colleagues and re-examine the guidelines.
	The guidelines are based on the false proposition that, if planners restrict the amount of garage and hard-standing space in people's homes, and the amount of car parking in city and town centres, people will be deterred from owning or using cars. That is a misunderstanding of human nature. As society gets more prosperous, and as the public transport alternatives are so obviously not up to many people's demands in relation to going to work, taking the children to school or going about their leisure and pleasure, of course, people will own cars. If there is not sufficient parking space at home, they will park out on the highway, and if there are not sufficient off-road parking places in town and city centres, more congestion will result as vehicles circulate around the town and city desperately looking for the limited parking places available, and having to play a kind of Russian roulette to get one. That increases congestion and pollution, and does not succeed meeting in the green objectives that underlie the policy.
	We have debated the issue of bus lanes. Again, it was disappointing that Ministers did not decide to include in the Bill a provision to allow vulnerable vehicles and other users of the highway such as motor cyclists and cyclists the right in every case to use the bus lane. Ministers were persuaded of the case for cyclists to use the bus lane, and said that that usually happened, so it would not have hurt to put it clearly in the legislation. They also said that they were studying the case of motor cyclists. Hundreds of thousands of cyclists and motor cyclists who may hear about this debate will be disappointed that the Bill does not recognise their needs or include them as reasonable users of the bus lane. The Minister says that he has a lot of sympathy with my view, so I do not know why he cannot use his legislative pen to put my mind at rest and show either that that is happening or that it should happen as a matter of course.
	Many Members on both sides of the House recognise that traffic lights, their location and use, are one of the big problems in creating congested Britain. We have made several proposals for improving the use, phasing and deployment of traffic lights, which we think could make a lot of sense. The case, as with that for amending the bus lane regulations, is based on safety as well as speed and ease of passage. Many accidents occur at junctions, which is not surprising given that, at junctions, traffic moving in different directions comes into conflict and powerful vehicles come into potential conflict with bicycles and pedestrians. Junctions are the most dangerous parts of the road network. Our motorways, which are by far and away our fastest roads, are also our safest roads, because most of the hazards of the junction have been taken out by grade-separated interchanges, meaning that traffic moving in different directions never comes into conflict. Of course, no pedestrians or push cycles are allowed on motorways. Relatively high speeds at uncongested times of day are therefore combined with much greater safety because of segregation of traffic and proper use of the motorway.
	On the main trunk road network, which does not have dual carriageway and grade-separated interchange provision, there is much more conflict between different types of vehicle moving in different directions and more vulnerable road users. I hope that, as a result of the debate, the Government will recognise the need to study those junctions and how many of them can be enlarged and improved with a view to segregating different users of the junction and segregating traffic flowing in different directions to reduce the likelihood of conflict. My single message to the Government on safety and congestion is that it is not speed that causes the accidents, and it is not just a case of trying to get traffic moving more quickly to stop congestion. If we want a really safe highway network, we must design conflict out and we will then cure both congestion and many of the safety problems.
	We need to be much kinder to the pedestrian. On the railways, we have a very good rule that people should never walk anywhere near the tracks and should not try to cross the railway lines other than by means of a bridge, and yet different rules seem to apply when it comes to managing the main road network. As a pedestrian in London rather than a car user, I think that we pedestrians should also obey the rules. Pedestrians should have proper provision, probably with more bridges and underpasses, so that we can cross the road without having to wait for traffic and avoid the conflict between pedestrians and cars that often occurs.
	The Bill provides for a massive stealth tax on the utility companies. My right hon. and hon. Friends have calculated that it could be as much as 55 per household as a result of the powers

It being Seven o'clock, Madam Deputy Speaker put the Question already proposed from the Chair, pursuant to Order [5 January].
	The House divided: Ayes 333, Noes 136.

Question accordingly agreed to.

European Parliamentary and Local Elections (Pilots) Bill

Lords Reasons for insisting on certain of their amendments to which the Commons have disagreed, considered.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Under the Order of the House of 8 March, any message from the Lords relating to the European Parliamentary and Local Elections (Pilots) Bill may be considered forthwith, without Question put.
	A message has been received from the Lords as follows: the Lords disagree to the Commons amendment to a Lords amendment to the European Parliamentary and Local Elections (Pilots) Bill, and they insist on a Lords amendment to which the Commons have disagreed, for which disagreement they assign their reason.

Patrick McLoughlin: I beg to move, That the House do now sit in private.
	Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 163 (Motions to sit in private):
	The House proceeded to a Division.

Madam Deputy Speaker: I have asked the Serjeant at Arms to investigate the delay in the Lobby.

The House having divided: Ayes 122, Noes 311.

Question accordingly negatived.

Lords Amendment 1B
	  
	Lords Disagreement and Reason

The Lords disagree to Commons Amendment 1A to Lords Amendment 1 for the following Reason
	Because it is appropriate to make provision for no more than two pilot regions, as recommended by the Electoral Commission.

Christopher Leslie: I beg to move, That this House does not insist on its amendment No. 1A to Lords Amendment No. 1.

Madam Deputy Speaker: With this it will be convenient to discuss the following: Government amendment (a) to Lords amendment No. 1.
	Lords amendment No. 3BLords Insistence and Reason
	The Lords insist on their Amendment 3 to which the Commons have disagreed, for the following Reason
	Because it is appropriate to impose the requirements set out in the Lords amendment.
	Government motion to insist on its disagreement to the said amendment.
	Government amendment (a) in lieu thereof.

Christopher Leslie: Earlier today, their lordships considered again the views of the Commons expressed last Monday evening. The package of measures that we propose includes a concession to their lordships: whereas the Government and the Electoral Commission had hoped to dispense with the requirement for a second person to witness the signature of each voter with a declaration of identity, we are prepared to acquiesce to their Lordships on that particular point, and allow the witnessed signature arrangement to occur in this June's all-postal elections. I realise that that will disappoint the Electoral Commission and many hon. Members, because of worries about the efficacy of a witness signature process, but on balanceand in view of the insistence by the Lords on that pointwe feel that on that matter we can compromise without overriding harm coming to the overall policy of all-postal voting. However, we remain opposed to sending expensive and wasteful receipt acknowledgements to every elector who returns a ballot paper, so we wish to delete the measure that would provide for that.

Andrew Bennett: It is a shame that we are making that concession to the Lords. What will happen to ballot papers that are returned without the declaration completed correctly? Will the returning officer give people the opportunity to correct their mistake, or will the mistake invalidate their papers?

Christopher Leslie: Owing to the insistence of their lordships, we felt that we needed to try to find consensus on the matter. I tend to agree with my hon. Friend that we would ideally have moved to a single signature arrangement, such as that which we initially set out, but their lordships clearly do not feel that we are yet ready to do that. I suspect that we will return to the matter at another time. The declaration of identity will require a witness signature, which happens under normal postal voting arrangements for postal voting on demand. In that respect, the provision is in line with existing legislation, but I think that further reform will undoubtedly be necessary.
	More significantly, their lordships overturned the will of the House of Commons on the Government's intention for four regionsthe east midlands, the north-east, the north-west and Yorkshireto undertake all-postal voting. They did that despite hon. Members' vote last Monday to support the measure. I listened closely to the debate in their lordships' House, and they gave no more substantive reasons for overturning the proposal for four regions than they gave previously. The House of Commons has made its decisions on four regions before in full view of the facts, which is why I urge it to do so again.
	Four regions will make up a good pilot. It will cover a minority of the country31 per cent.but it will be on a large enough scale to test out new procedures effectively. Postal voting is worth trying out on that larger scale. It makes democracy easier for the public because people's opportunities to express their views are brought to their doorsteps, so electors are not expected to overcome obstacles and travel to a polling station. I understand that several noble Lords and Conservative Members occasionally say that we should not make voting more convenient, but that is a ludicrous position to take.

George Osborne: rose

Christopher Leslie: Talking of ludicrous, I give way to the hon. Gentleman.

George Osborne: The Minister is belittling the arguments against including the north-west, for example, in the pilot. Does he accept that the Electoral Commission did not feel able to recommend the north-west as a pilot area? Why do the Government think that they can override the Electoral Commission?

Christopher Leslie: The hon. Gentleman should study closely what the Electoral Commission says. It is true that its definition of what forms a pilot differs from the Government's as regards the issue of scale, but it is certainly not the case that it said no to Yorkshire and the north-west. Indeed, it said that those regions in themselves were potentially suitableit gave them that designation. [Interruption.] It is true that the regions were not on the Electoral Commission's top two list, which is what the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) implies from a sedentary position, but nevertheless I hope that hon. Members will acknowledge that it recognised north-west and Yorkshire as potentially suitable and that they remain as such.

Paul Tyler: Will the Minister confirm that the Electoral Commission thought that the third regionif there was to be a thirdwas going to be Scotland, rather than either of the other two regions?

Christopher Leslie: It is certainly not the case that neither of the other two regions was considered. The Electoral Commission produced a grouping of regions that it deemed to be potentially suitable. As we have said many times throughout the passage of the Bill, Scotland and Scottish returning officers did not want to proceed with the process, which is why we moved down the list. Yorkshire and the north-west came next on the list, so we followed the Electoral Commission's ranking in the light of the views of experts, administrators and regional returning officers. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will acknowledge that as a relatively logical process.

George Osborne: The experts at the Electoral Commission said, on 4 March, that they
	felt unable to make a positive recommendation in respect of those regions
	that includes the north-west
	having assessed their suitability against the guidelines we have applied.
	Why is the Minister overriding them?

Christopher Leslie: If the hon. Gentleman reads further the letter sent to me by the commission's chairman, he will see the sentence:
	We named a further four regions that were potentially suitable as pilots.

George Osborne: Potentially suitable.

Christopher Leslie: Yes, potentially suitable, as I said to the hon. Gentleman. He cannot in any way suggest that the Electoral Commission had not said that Yorkshire and the north-west were somehow not potentially suitable.

Chris Mole: Does the Minister accept that the evidence given by the regional returning officer for Yorkshire and Humberside to the Select Committee's current inquiry asserted that the worst that could happen now would be for the Government to change their mind about the pre-planning for the elections, because the local authorities are not a position to return to a traditional approach to voting in this election?

Christopher Leslie: It is indeed the case that, increasingly, returning officers in the north-west, Yorkshire, the east midlands and the north-east are saying that they want to proceed with all-postal voting. That is the view of the administrators on the ground, and they not only want the Government to sustain that position; they want Parliament to sustain it. That is what I am asking the Commons to agree to tonight.
	We know for a fact that more people will participate in all-postal voting. What can be wrong with that? Surely it is right and proper that we take steps to encourage wider participation. That is the responsible path to take if we are to reinvigorate our democratic process.

Gerald Kaufman: I just want to clarify something because I may have got the wrong end of the stickit would not be the first time. When my hon. Friend was speaking to the motion on the amendment and announcing the change regarding witnesses which my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Bennett) deplored, did he say that the matter on which the Government were now giving way to the Lords was something that the Electoral Commission wanted?

Christopher Leslie: My right hon. Friend is entirely right. The commission advised Parliament and the Government that it would prefer to move away from the process of the declaration-of-identity witness signature towards a single-signature arrangement. It is a pity that the Opposition parties, in collusion in the other place, have been determined to push that point, but we do not feel that it is at the core of the Bill, and we have reluctantly decided to concede on it.

Gerald Kaufman: Having given that explanation, which confirms what I thought I heard, will my hon. Friend explain how even the heights of hypocrisy which both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats can reachthey are heights with no ceilingallow them to reconcile their demand that we abandon something that the Electoral Commission wanted with them giving as their reason for insisting on the amendment the fact that the commission wanted something? Just what kind of creeps are these people?

Christopher Leslie: I am not sure that I can answer that last question in parliamentary terms, but I agree that even the sky is not the limit when it comes to the double standards and inconsistency in the arguments pursued by other parties. When the commission's advice suits them, they will uphold it; when it does not suit them, they will not uphold it.
	If the Opposition parties recognise the arrangements that are in place, they will see that the Electoral Commission is there to advise, but ultimately Government and Parliament have to make the final decisions. We make decisions in full cognisance of the advice that is available to us but also with an eye to the fact that we are accountable to those who elect us, unlike, of course, those in the other Chamber.
	On the issue of scale, which concerned Members in the other place, it would be perverse to ignore the plans for October's all-postal referendum on elected regional assembliesindeed, the Electoral Commission supports all-postal votingso proceeding in the north-west, the north-east and Yorkshire clearly makes good sense. We have answered questions and made proposals to placate worries about fraud, and the Electoral Commission, the returning officers and the police are all keen to work together to make all-postal voting a success. Extensions of the offence of personation have been included in the Bill, and election officials have other new powers to crack down on any hint of malpractice. It is extremely odd that Opposition parties in the Lords should say in the same breath that they are prepared to see all-postal voting in two regions, but not in a further two. All the queries raised have been about the system and nature of postal voting, including specious worries about fraud, which can be answered and ameliorated satisfactorily. That is entirely different from suggesting that a greater problem is presented by having four regions as opposed to two. If their lordships thought that the arrangements for all-postal voting were unsafe, why are they happy with two regions but not three or four? Scale presents few issues or problems, yet their lordships failed to address that question.
	All-postal voting in only two regions could result in fewer people voting by post than was the case in the last round of local election pilots in 2003a backward step which would be inexplicable to the many members of the public who are keen on all-postal voting. There is little more to be said about the matter, as the House of Commons has expressed its view, and should do so again tonight. By delaying the Bill, their lordships are jeopardising the crucial preparation period before elections. Returning officers need time to prepare, contract and put their plans in place, and they have asked Parliament to make a decision now on which regions will go ahead. By supporting the proposals, the House of Commons can reiterate its strong view that four regions need to proceed. I therefore commend the proposals to the House.

Nick Hawkins: Cracks in the Government edifice have started to appear with the first Government concession. Although it is welcome, it does not go nearly far enough, and the Minister, as usual, has tried to skate over the Electoral Commission's true view. Only a few days ago, in the Chamber, we referred to a letter to him from Sam Younger, the chairman of the Electoral Commission, who, I remind him, said that
	it does not follow that the Commission would be unconcerned about the number of pilot regions. As I have mentioned, we expected the Government to nominate three regions and were surprised to learn that the Bill was to be amended to name four regions.
	That is about as strongly worded as letters to Ministers get[Interruption.] The Deputy Prime Minister is chuntering. Throughout our debates we have mentioned the unseen hand of the Deputy Prime Minister, who was determined to get his own way about Yorkshire and Humber. He has been working by remote control to try to persuade the Electoral Commission of the Government's case. Finally, he is here in person tonight, and is openly blustering about wanting to get his way, as he always tries to do. Fortunately, we have a bicameral legislature. The upper House is entitled to express its view, and we want to support its sensible warnings about fraud and the dangers of involving half the country in postal pilots. It will come as no surprise to the House that the Opposition remain entirely unconvinced by the arguments the Minister has expressed again tonight for piloting in four regions.
	There are two fundamental reasons why we and the other place must stand firm. First, it is irresponsible to operate a so-called pilot scheme in nearly half of England. Almost half the regions will hold combined European parliamentary and local elections in June, when pilot schemes should be designed to generate evidence on a system of voting that is new, innovative and by no means guaranteed secure. The independent Electoral Reform Society has said, as the Minister is well aware, that for the first time in 130 years there is an opportunity, sadly, for large-scale electoral fraud.

Ronnie Campbell: There was a pilot scheme during the last local elections in my constituency, Blyth Valley. When I asked the returning officer afterwards how it went, he said he was amazed at how correct the ballot was and at the fact that there was little, if any, fraud.

Nick Hawkins: That is not the experience of many who spoke in the previous debates on this[Interruption.] The Deputy Prime Minister continues to shout from a sedentary position. I refer him to the detailed speeches of the noble Lord Greaves in several debates about wholesale fraud in various areas

Several hon. Members: rose

Nick Hawkins: particularly the north-west

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman was not giving way at that point. He clearly is now.

Dave Watts: I am grateful to the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Mr. Hawkins). Will he refer to the commission's report on the pilot schemes that were conducted both in my own constituency and in that of my hon. Friend the Member for Blyth Valley (Mr. Campbell), and acknowledge that the report indicated that there was no evidence whatever that fraud had been committed? Will he deal with that specific point? I cannot see that he is providing any evidence to justify his claims.

Nick Hawkins: I can certainly respond to the hon. Gentleman. The Electoral Commission's own report on the matter raises concerns about fraud, specifically in relation to the north-west. The commission points out that there may well be criminal trials arising from some of the pending allegations, and some of those trials might coincide with the forthcoming elections. That was one of the reasons why the commission was so concerned about the north-west.

William Cash: I heard the Deputy Prime Minister shouting across the Floor of the House, Where's the evidence? I am sure he is acquainted with the Alden committee report relating to Birmingham, which has a Labour council. I shall refer to that later, if I catch Madam Deputy Speaker's eye. I should be very surprised if the Deputy Prime Minister does not know about that report, in which Mr. Alden stated that matters had become so bad that the rules that exist in Northern Ireland had to be applied, and the police went on to say that the postal voting system had few major checks or controls. The situation in Birmingham at the time was a scandal, and I am surprised that the Deputy Prime Minister does not seem to be aware of it.

Nick Hawkins: I am grateful to my hon. Friend.

Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. Before the hon. Gentleman replies, I would prefer this short debate to be conducted in an orderly manner, without Members on either side shouting from sedentary positions.

Nick Hawkins: I am grateful for that, Madam Deputy Speaker. The Government are showing that they wish to ignore the advice of their own creation, the Electoral Commission, which was able to recommend unequivocally only two pilot areas. It has done the research. During the debates in another place, Lord Greaves highlighted specific problems in the two regions that the Government are seeking to insist on, where there are serious concerns about fraud, electoral malpractice and intimidation. I refer hon. Members to columns 12 to 18 of 26 January in another place. I also refer hon. Members to what Lord Greaves said in the debate this afternoon, when he repeated his concerns.

Andrew Bennett: Will the hon. Gentleman separate two issues? There has been some evidence of fraud under the existing postal vote system, but that will apply whatever we decide tonight. However, there is no evidence of fraud in the pilot. There is a strong argument that if there is a high turnout, which we could get as a result of postal ballots, any fraud will become much less significant.

Nick Hawkins: That point simply does not deal with the fact that on this issue, in relation to these pilots, the Electoral Commission is recommending against the two extra areas that the Government want to include. One of the concerns that the commission raises specifically is fraud in relation to the north-west.

Christopher Leslie: The hon. Gentleman says that the Electoral Commission recommended against the north-west and Yorkshire. Is he absolutely sure that that is a correct representation of the Electoral Commission's view?

Nick Hawkins: As the Minister knows full well, we have said that the Electoral Commission was able unequivocally to recommend only two regions. The Government are ignoring their own Electoral Commission's recommendations. The Government are insisting on these four pilot regions for their own reasons. The Minister in another place, Lord Filkin, made it perfectly clear that he does not believe that the clearly-evidenced lack of enthusiasm of regional returning officers or the possibility of malpractice should be any impediment to piloting the all-postal schemes in the two additional areas. The Electoral Commission clearly begs to differ, as Sam Younger's recent letter to the Minister makes absolutely clear. We remain absolutely adamant that only the two regions unequivocally recommended by the Electoral Commissionthe north-east and the east midlandsshould be pilots.

Dave Watts: May I point out that the overwhelming view of people in the north-west, as received in representations, is support for the idea of all-postal ballots? Will the hon. Gentleman deal with my original point? Can he give us any evidence of fraud and tell us whether any prosecutions are going ahead as a result of the pilot schemes that were launched in the north-west and in other areas?

Nick Hawkins: I dealt with that point in my earlier answer to the hon. Gentleman. If he reads the Electoral Commission's report, he will find that it deals specifically with the concerns about possible fraud that were so adequately set out by Lord Greaves, who has extensive experience of elections in the north-west. That is further evidence of why the Electoral Commission is right.

William Cash: Does my hon. Friend accept that the real issue often turns on the electoral roll? A serious problem has arisen in that context. Far too many people are going on to the electoral roll, which appears to have some connection with the latest immigration problems.

Nick Hawkins: I very much agree with my hon. Friend.
	Given that these are pilotsexperimental trial schemesit seems sensible to have them only in the two regions where the Government's own Electoral Commission is confident about using the all-postal scheme, and where all the regional returning officers support it and there are no fears about fraud. If the pilots are successful, next time round more enthusiasm and confidence might be expressed by regional returning officers in areas where they have not been confident in the past; then, perhaps, the all-postal system could be widened.
	I welcome the Government's concessions on houses in multiple occupation. They have not gone far enough, but they are at least recognising some of the arguments that were advanced by Opposition Members here and in another place.
	We feel that the Government are taking an unjustifiable risk by insisting on four pilot regions against the recommendation of the Electoral Commission, which, as Sam Younger's letter makes clear, is still concerned about that. It is vital to balance any plans that the Government have for innovation against the security and safety of our democratic process. We welcome the Government's small concession, but they have not gone far enough. We shall continue to maintain our position and to vote against their continuing attempts to impose this measure.

Gerald Kaufman: I elicited from my hon. Friend the Minister the fact that the House of Lords is insisting on excluding these two regions because, in the contention of the Opposition, the Government are going against the wishes of the Electoral Commission; but there were cheers from the Liberal Democrat Benches when my hon. Friend said that he was going to make a concession that went against the wishes of the Electoral Commission. What we get from that rabble oppositeor those several rabbles oppositeis not honest, open, clear reasons for opposing the measure, but adventitious excuses to avoid something that they do not want to happen. They do not want to give more people more opportunities to vote in elections that they are scared of losing. They want as few people as possible to vote[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Tatton (Mr. Osborne) jeers, but it would be very difficult for the Conservative vote in my constituency to get any lower than it is. It has almost disappeared there, although there is still just a little scope for further reduction.

George Osborne: rose

Gerald Kaufman: I shall give way in a moment.
	Let us be clear about this. My hon. Friend the Minister is right when he says that the pilot scheme is wanted overwhelmingly in the north-west. That has been made absolutely clear by my constituents and those of many other hon. Members.

Shona McIsaac: Is my right hon. Friend aware that one of the Liberal Democrat Euro MPs in his region, Mr. Chris Davies, has stated his reason for opposing the all-postal ballot? It is:
	Automatic postal voting is designed solely for those too lazy to make the effort.
	Does not that reveal the Liberal Democrats' true colours?

Gerald Kaufman: One never knows what the Liberal Democrats' true colours are, because they vary from street to street. If they could get away with it, they would vary from house to house. The fact is that this Chris Davieswho was, happily, booted out of this place and found a haven in the European Parliamenthas said that postal voting is for lazy voters. My constituents will be told, whether they get the pilot scheme or not, that the Liberal Democrats believe that if they want postal votes they are lazy voters. But let me tell the House something else. If the pilot scheme goes ahead in the north-west, the Liberal Democratscertainly those in Manchesterwill claim that they fought for it all along and really wanted it. They will tell everyone what a marvellous privilege it is for the voters to get what the Liberal Democrats have been seeking to get for them.
	The hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Mr. Hawkins) talked about fraud. We in the Gorton constituency are well accustomed to what fraud is. We are well accustomed to the Liberal Democrats claiming that they got 120,000 for the Anson Cabin project, when in fact I got it with the assistance of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister. In Gorton, we are accustomed to lies, cheating, hypocrisy and misrepresentation at that level, from that rabble. As I have said, if we prevail tonight and get the pilot scheme, the Liberal Democrats will say that they wanted it, that they love it and that it is the best possible way of proceeding in our local and European elections on 10 June.

David Borrow: Does my right hon. Friend agree that my constituents will find it difficult to understand why money should be invested in running a postal ballot for the referendum on a regional parliament in the autumn of this year, if a similar investment cannot be made in June for the European elections? It would seem sensible to my constituents that one lot of investment should be used for two elections.

Gerald Kaufman: My hon. Friend is absolutely right.
	Let us be clear about this. What we are seeing from the two Opposition parties is not a consistent, honourable approach to elections. They want as few people as possible to vote, because the only way that they win council elections is on very low polls.

George Osborne: Will the right hon. Gentleman confirm that the Conservative MPs in the north-westand probably the Liberal Democrat MPs as wellhad the highest turnouts in their constituencies at the general election, and that the Labour MPs had the lowest? The hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs. Ellman) had the lowest in the country. I dare say that the turnout in Gorton was pretty low, too.

Gerald Kaufman: But it is quality. When I was first elected to the House of Commons in 1970, the Conservatives got 10,000 votes from an electorate of 43,000. In 2001, they got 2,700 votes from an electorate of 67,000. In the local elections in Manchester, the Conservatives are hard put to it in my six wards to get into four figures. They are afraid, just as the Liberal Democrats are afraid, that they will be found out if people get the opportunity to vote in large numbers. Well, they are being found out tonight.
	I recommend that my right hon. and hon. Friends insist on this. I quite understand why my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister believes that Yorkshire and Humberside should be included and I say this to the hon. Member for Surrey Heath: if he believes that there are huge opportunities for fraud in these postal ballots, he should not be saying that we can have two rather than four. He should be saying that there should be none, but he dare not say that. I will acquit him of inconsistency in one matternamely, he possibly believes what he is saying. I do not give that to the other party.

David Heath: One of the misfortunes of these occasions is that it is almost impossible to put any new arguments on such matters once they have been debated at length in the House and in another place. We have heard no new arguments from the right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman), who seems to have taken a bitter pill before arriving in the Chamber. He showed no evidence whatever of having read the Electoral Commission's report before commenting on it, which is a cause of great sadness.

Gerald Kaufman: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. You will be aware, as will the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Mrs. Browning), that I am a member of the Speaker's Committee on the Electoral Commission. The Electoral Commission sends me all its documents for careful perusal.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: The right hon. Gentleman is experienced enough to know that that is not point of order and, equally, experienced enough to know that he has got it on the record.

David Heath: As I said, there is no evidence that the right hon. Gentleman has read the Electoral Commission's report, which is perhaps worth repeating. Let me get away from that to say that I welcome the Government's move in incorporating at least some of the changes recommended in another place in terms of declaration of identity. That is helpful. It means that we do not have two different systems applying in terms of postal votes, whether in respect of these pilots or every other election happening on the same day, at the same time and in the same way. That seems to me to be sensible, up to the point where we have the improvement recommended by the Electoral Commission, which I wholeheartedly support and which involves a pre-signature system.

Dave Watts: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Christopher Leslie: rose

David Heath: I shall give way to the Minister in a moment. The pre-signature system will provide for better voter identification, but it clearly cannot be in place for these elections. We hope, however, that it will be for future elections.

Christopher Leslie: The hon. Gentleman has acknowledged that the Government are reluctantly conceding on the declaration of identity, but will he also acknowledge that we are conceding thatsomething he has been pressing forin the face of the advice from the Electoral Commission? Does he think it right that we can take advice from the Electoral Commission but perhaps not necessarily act on every single piece of advice from it?

David Heath: The Minister has the difficulty of arguing two contrary positionsapparently accepting what he says is the Electoral Commission's advice on the one hand while, on the other, rejecting it entirely.
	I take what is, I hope, a more pragmatic and sensible view: I agree with the Electoral Commission's intention, which is clearly stated in its important document as to where it wants to get to. We do not think that we are there yet; the Minister knows perfectly well that we are not there yet. We have a holding position until the next election, when, I hope, we will have a proper system for pre-registration of voters, which will eliminate the potential for fraud in that area without our having the rather cumbersome system that none of us wants.

Dave Watts: The hon. Gentleman seems concerned not to cause confusion among the electorate. Voters in St. Helens have already used a postal ballot. They will be asked to participate in a traditional ballot twice, then go back to a postal ballot. If that is not confusing, I do not know what isand it is exactly what the commission's report said should be avoided.

David Heath: The hon. Gentleman makes his intervention at entirely the wrong point, on a matter that I have not yet addressed. Nevertheless, I will answer his point. Exactly the same argument could just as easily be made by me, in pursuit of my constituents' interests. They had an all-postal ballot for South Somerset district council but will be prohibited by the legislation that the hon. Gentleman is supporting this evening from an all-postal ballot in the European elections.

Dave Watts: rose

David Heath: Let the hon. Gentleman listen. I have said all along that one should either have a pilot scheme that enables one to address some of the outstanding issues or a UK-wide postal ballotin which I personally can see some merit.
	The Government propose neither. They say, We will not have a proper pilot scheme because we will not have the two regions that the commission proposed. We will poll the whole north of England. Anybody north of the Trent will have an all-postal ballot. Anybody south of the Trent will be prohibited. Where is the logic for the constituents whom many of us seek to represent?
	If the Government had said they wanted a UK-wide, all-postal ballot, we would have raised exactly the same concerns about the potential for personation and fraud but at least there would have been some logic. There is no logic in the Government having a pilot scheme that is not a pilot scheme and determining a region that constitutes half the local authorities in Englandsaying that an all-postal ballot is not available for the other half. Neither will one be available to Scotland, despite the fact that it was the runner-up in the Electoral Commission report, or Wales. It was not even considered for south-west England because of the addition of Gibraltarwhich apparently is a prohibitive factor in an all-postal ballot.
	Every argument advanced by the Government has been turned on its head in the next breaththey have been arguing in two directions at once. They know that this development is in the interests of political expediency and nothing else; otherwise, they would look for a pilot scheme or a UK-wide election. After all, we are talking about a single national campaign in which half the electorate will go the polls two or three weeks before the rest of the country. They will watch the same television programmes and see the same campaign unfolding.

Michael Connarty: The hon. Gentleman prays in aid the situation in Scotland. He obviously does not take into account the fact that electoral registration officers in Scotland said that they could not cope. Although Scotland was possibly recommended, the electoral officers were the barrier more than anything else. That was not a matter of political choice but dictated by the logistics of the exercise.

David Heath: The hon. Gentleman adduces an argument which in other debates was hotly contested by his right hon. and hon. Friends, who said that that claim was absolute nonsense and that the particular returning officer who gave that indication did not represent the advice of returning officers across Scotland. They said that Scotland had come third and was entitled to the opportunity to engage in this great experiment.

Dave Watts: rose

David Heath: I have already given way to the hon. Gentleman. The Government plucked two English regions out of the air

Christopher Leslie: Not out of the air.

David Heath: They were not positively recommended by the Electoral Commission. I accept that they were listed as having potential, which was not realised. I have potential to open the batting for England, which has not been realised yet and is unlikely to be realised in the immediate future. Nevertheless, the Government have chosen to take that line.
	There were arguments of the Government's own devising for not including those regions in the pilot scheme: the number of local authority elections on that day, the complexity of the region, and the potential difficultiesthey are no more than potential difficultiesof fraud. The hon. Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Bennett) made the point that the potential for fraud is diluted because it is such a large area. Of course, he is absolutely right in terms of the European parliamentary elections. At the same time, however, every single person voting in European parliamentary elections also votes in wards in local authority elections. That is where the potential mischief applies and where we must tread carefully if we are to maintain the integrity of the voting system.
	I believe that the Government have made an important concession this evening, and it is the first of two concessions that they will make before the end of this week[Interruption.] I hear the comment from the Labour Benches that that is not so. We shall see. I believe that they will be forced to recognise that the Electoral Commission's advice on determining what areas should be available is not to be swept aside for political convenience, and not to be arbitrarily ignored. I believe that we will come to a satisfactory conclusion. We are only halfway there this evening. I suspect that we will conclude the business when this matter has been debated one more time in another place, and we shall all return believing that we have done a good job in improving this legislation.

Andrew Miller: I will be brief, as I understand that other Members wish to speak.
	I want to develop the point that was first raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman). Undoubtedly, there is a contradiction in the position being adopted by the collective Opposition. On the one hand, it is all right to overturn the advice of the Electoral Commission on the issue of signatures, but on the other, it is not all right on the issue of postal votes. The only aspect of my right hon. Friend's contribution with which I disagreed was that he minced his words so much in his criticism of the Opposition, and particularly of the way in which the Liberal Democrats have two stances. That was revealed in response to the intervention of my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Shona McIsaac) in which she referred to quotes from a Member of the European Parliament, Mr. Chris Davies, who purports to represent my constituency, too. That particular individual argues against postal ballots on the basis that it is a provision for lazy votershe does not consider elderly people, shift workers, including many of my constituents, elderly people, people with families and so on.

Dari Taylor: Does my hon. Friend accept that the reason why the Opposition parties welcome the fact that the other place has thought that the north-west and Yorkshire and Humber should not be included in the pilots is that the high turnout will mean that Labour votes are expressed and recorded, and Labour local authorities and Labour Governments elected? That is manipulation coming directly from the other place.

Andrew Miller: My hon. Friend makes a point a behalf of her constituents, whom she represents extremely well.
	I want to return to my point about the quotes from that Member of the European Parliament. At least he has some legitimacy, albeit under the bizarre list system, in my constituency. Unlike those at the other end of the Corridor, I was elected to represent Ellesmere Port and Neston. I suppose Chris Davies has some legitimacy in that respect as an MEP, but not a single vote is cast for anyone at the other end of the Corridor. Yet I understand that, by a vote of 174 to 130 dominated by the hereditaries, the will of this Housethe will of the people who sent me here to represent Ellesmere Port and Nestonhas been overturned.

Dave Watts: Does my hon. Friend agree that what is missing from the debate is the issue of what the voters want? It has been shown that when a postal vote is held, double the number of people

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman should be addressing the Chair, not his hon. Friend.

Dave Watts: I apologise, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Is my hon. Friend aware that the turnout is doubled when a postal vote takes place? When a Liberal Democrat Member says that this is about lazy voters, he is actually accusing half the voters of being lazy.

Andrew Miller: My hon. Friend makes his point eloquently. His constituency has been subject to one of the pilots, as has Chorley in the north-west. I have examined the statistics carefully, because I am interested in alternative ways of voting. I have investigated other systems such as electronic voting. Although that system benefited the Conservative party in Vale Royal, I am in favour of it. I think it would be very short-sighted of us not to look for new opportunities to enfranchise people in all our communities.

William Cash: The hon. Gentleman mentioned the remarkable result in Chorley, where a postal ballot system increased the turnout from 31 per cent. in 1998 to 61 per cent. How does he explain the fact that the turnout dropped by 0.4 per cent. in Greenwich and by 3 per cent. in Hackney under the same system?

Andrew Miller: I think there are special circumstances that we should examine in all the pilots we undertake, but I also think the Greenwich pilot was far too small for us to make any statistical sense out of the data. I should be happy to debate the point with the hon. Gentleman elsewhere.
	My constituents in the north-west undoubtedly want more opportunities to vote. People who work difficult shifts in the chemical and vehicle-building industries in particular often find that that they must either rush to the ballot box after a 12-hour shift or miss their opportunities. Tremendous strides have been made in the recent past in removing some of the constraints preventing people from having postal ballots. I think we should agree, in the interests of those people and the other sections of society that I mentioned earlier, that it is utterly irresponsible of the Lords not to allow the will of the people of my constituency and of this House to prevail.

William Cash: One of the biggest problems involved in the whole question of postal voting is the background to the reasons why people want the turnout to increase. According to a recent opinion poll connected with the approaching European elections, it was stated that no more than 19 per cent. of the people of this country would participate. We know that in the last European elections the turnout was only 24 per cent., and I believe that in one part of the north-westLiverpool, I thinkit was only 9 per cent.
	There is a serious problem. This is a democratic question, and it is also about whether or not politics and politicians in general inspire confidence. We have discovered that, as a result of what has happened in the last few years, confidence in the electoral system has fallen further and further. Indeed, the average turnout in general elections between 1945 and 1997 was approximately 73 per cent., but between 1997 and 2001 there was an astonishing drop of 12 per cent. People in this country certainly need to take account of the fact that this is not just a question of the technicalities that can be applied by increasing the number of people who vote by post. There is a much deeper crisis about our democracy as a whole, which is clearly demonstrated by the figures that I gave for the period 1997 to 2001. It is clear that it is directly connected to the atmosphere of dishonesty, to which the Government have contributed by the way in which they have gone about what they have done.

Andrew Bennett: Will the hon. Gentleman go back over those figures and relate them to how close the public perceived the election to be? Turnout almost every time went up when people thought that it was going to be a close contest.

William Cash: I am not against the idea of postal votes. That is something on which we ought to agree on both sides of the House; I am sure we do. I am speaking for myself here. I am deeply encouraged by the fact that in Chorley, as I said, there was an increase in turnout from 31 per cent. in 1998 to 61 per cent. in 2002. That cannot be anything but a good thing because it is people participating in the democratic process, but the problem is that that is not mirrored throughout the country.
	I have to take the point that the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) made, which is simple but none the less valid. We are going to have elections that will affect the outcome in the European Parliament and thereby, because of the power of co-decision, have a vast impact not only on this House but on our electorate, because the power of co-decision is a power equivalent to that of voting in the Council of Ministers. Therefore, we should be taking the matter extremely seriously, and I am sure we are. The point that the hon. Gentleman made that there should be consistency throughout the country is important. In the areas that are disputed in the amendment and in the northern part of the country in broad terms, why should a system be put in place that differentiates sharply from the position in the south? I am afraid that I cannot

Several hon. Members: rose

William Cash: I will certainly give way. I cannot conceive of any reason for that. I am happy to give way to the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Shona McIsaac), not the right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman).

Shona McIsaac: Does not the hon. Gentleman acknowledge that, in the Yorkshire and Humber region, there is to be a referendum in October that returning officers are preparing for? Many parts of that region had postal vote elections last year. To go back to the traditional way of voting in June will be a backward step, because the majority of people who have had postal votes already assume that they can vote in that way in June. In fact, his own party in my area is already promoting that fact on its website.

William Cash: That is a perfectly fair debating point. I think that we should be taking the whole question

Shona McIsaac: Answer.

William Cash: Wait a minute. I am not saying that I necessarily agree with that point but it is a perfectly fair point to make. What I am saying is that we should be taking the matter extremely seriously. This may be a truncated debate and our time may run outmy time in particular may run out very soonbut in terms of what is at stake this is a central question for the future of democracy in this country. We had better get this right.
	The Deputy Prime Minister was ranting on and asking for the evidence, so I quoted the Alden committee report, which is really very instructive. The Labour council had the good sense to appoint a Conservative city councillor whom they greatly trusted to lead the investigation. The Birmingham Post quoted John Alden as saying that until he had completed his investigation, he had not realised how serious the perversion of democracy had become. That is in relation to postal voting, personation and intimidation at polling stations in Birmingham.

Dave Watts: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that what he is referring to is in relation not to all-postal voting but to traditional voting? He seems to be advocating doing away with all postal voting in any circumstances.

William Cash: I am not advocating that. The hon. Gentleman heard me just now saying that I could see advantages in postal voting systems, provided that they are free of the perversion of democracy that John Alden identified. I am glad to see the Minister nodding at that. We have been round this track before, and I feel strongly about the need to ensure that we have a proper voting system. The more people who participate, the better. Indeed, the issue of the European elections will become increasingly important because, to my great concern, more and more power in law making is being transferred upwards, in what I believe is an undemocratic way. If we are to have a European Parliament, let us for heaven's sake have a system that cannot be perverted as in the case identified in the Alden committee report.
	The Electoral Commission recommended that all-postal voting should become the norm for local elections, but there are concerns about ballot security. It said that investigations into previous postal voting had been both piecemeal and inadequate. What reliable evidence there is suggests that the scope for abuse is wider than the Government might care to admit.
	In addition to the problem of fraud, there are concerns about voter confidentiality
	It being one hour after the commencement of proceedings, Mr. Deputy Speaker put forthwith the Question already proposed from the Chair, pursuant to Order [8 March].
	Question agreed to.
	Mr. Deputy Speaker then proceeded to put the Question necessary to dispose of the business to be concluded at that hour.

Question put, That amendment (a) in lieu of Commons Amendment No. 1A, be made:
	The House divided: Ayes 274, Noes 152.

Question accordingly agreed to.
	Lords amendment 3BLords Insistence and Reason
	Amendment proposed: (a) in lieu thereof:
	Question put, That the amendment be made:
	The House divided: Ayes 312, Noes 115.

Question accordingly agreed to.
	Message to the Lords, with the Bill and Amendments.

NUCLEAR GLOBAL THREAT

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.[Mr. Kemp.]

Llew Smith: The Government's opposition to weapons of mass destruction was given as the reason for going to war with Iraq. Those weapons did not exist in Iraq, but they exist in Israel, and not only does Israel have weapons of mass destruction; it has the ultimate weapon of mass destructionnuclear weapons. Indeed, it has 200 nuclear warheads. However, there is no talk, and quite rightly so, of any kind of war with Israel, partly, one would have thought, because of its weapons of mass destruction, partly because it daily invades its neighbour, Palestine, and partly because it daily treats UN resolutions with contempt. Obviously, our Government are selective in their opposition to weapons of mass destruction: they are okay as far as Israel is concerned, but they are certainly not okay as far as Iraq is concerned.
	The threat of weapons of mass destruction, and in particular of atomic and nuclear weapons, has been with us since 1945, and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the tragedy that went with that and the tragedy that followed it, with the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians and, probably, a similar number of injuries. On some of the anniversaries of those bombings a message has come from the Japanese people: Step back and learn from us. Sadly, we have failed to act on that message, which the Japanese people wanted to be not only heard but acted on.
	Sadly, too, the Government are refusing to support some of the peacemakers, the people who have had the good sense and the courage to warn of nuclear proliferation and its threat to this planet. In particular I think of Mordechai Vanunu, who for the past 18 years has been rotting away in an Israeli jail. His crime, if crime is the right word, and it certainly is not, was telling the truth about Israel's nuclear capability when all around him were lying.
	We are also selective in our opposition to weapons of mass destruction, and in particular nuclear weapons, when we consider our own position. I am not saying that the Secretary of State of Defence has learned to love nuclear weapons, but he has accepted the need to use them in certain circumstances. I remember him saying a while back:
	The United Kingdom would, in the right conditions, in extreme circumstances of self-defence, be prepared to use nuclear weapons.[Official Report, 10 April 2002; Vol. 383, c. 30W.]
	For me, there are no conditions and no circumstances that would justify the use of nuclear weapons. Pressing that button would, for a number of reasons, be the ultimate act of madness.
	Nuclear weapons are madness because they are a total waste of money. Trident alone has cost the United Kingdom in the region of 15 billion, and the annual cost of operating those weapons is in the region of 280 million. It is madness to use that money on such a weapon when it could be spent for far more socially useful purposes, such as providing some of the services that for many years people took for granted. If we stopped spending money on nuclear warheads, we could, for example, use it to return to the old socialist principle of free higher education or, indeed, provide more decent pensions for our senior citizensthe list of uses is endless.
	Our nuclear industry involves another financial cost. On 2 July 2002, the Department of Trade and Industry announced that the clean-up liability for the civil nuclear industry was about 48 billion, and rising. The Ministry of Defence has not revealed the equivalent figure for the military today, but hopefully the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Mr. Rammell), will provide the House with such information when he replies to our debate.
	There is one cost that I would welcome, but which the Government have failed to meetproper compensation for the atomic veterans and their families for the suffering caused by events many years ago. It is estimated that the United States spent $3 trillion between 1940 and 1995 on a possible nuclear war. Annually, it spends $27 billion on preparations for such a war. Those figures do not include the costs of environmental clean-ups.
	Another act of madness is the waste of skills, talents and creativity in the design and production of nuclear weapons. Imagine what could be achieved if we transferred those skills from military to civilian use. How much more dignified life could be for many more people. The greatest act of madness is the fact that nuclear weapons would kill not only our so-called enemy but our supporters. Ironically, they would kill the people who designed and produced them. Not only would they kill the enemy, our own people and the people who designed and produced those weapons of war but they would kill civilisation as we know it. They would literally cost us the earth.
	That is not just my opinion, but the opinion of many eminent statespeople. Many years ago, the former US President Jimmy Carter argued:
	In an all-out nuclear war, more destructive power than in all of World War II would be unleashed every second during the long afternoon it would take for all the missiles and bombs to fall.
	A World War II every secondmore people killed in the first few hours than all the wars of history put together. The survivors, if any, would live in despair amid the poisoned ruins of a civilisation that had committed suicide.
	Khrushchev expressed similar sentiments, when he said that after a nuclear war
	the survivors would envy the dead.
	President Carter made his statement more than 20 years ago, and our capacity to destroy our beautiful planet has increased dramatically in the intervening period. No individual or Government has the moral right to agree to the use of nuclear weapons. We have no moral right to take away from our children the opportunity to experience the many beautiful things on our planet. We have no right to take away from them the opportunity to avoid the mistakes of our generation or to achieve something good with their lives. But that is what we would be doing if we ever agreed, as the Secretary of State for Defence has agreed, to use nuclear weapons in certain circumstances.
	The use of nuclear weapons would be not just an act of madness, but an act of hypocrisy. We cannot tell other states that they should not produce nuclear weapons or that they should abandon the nuclear weapons that they have if we continue to go down the nuclear road. It has been estimated that 128,000 nuclear warheads have been built worldwide since 1945, 70,000 of them in the United States. Our continued nuclear role is not only an act of madness and hypocrisy, but in my opinion and in the opinion of many lawyers it is illegal. We are signatories to the non-proliferation treaty, yet we daily breach the laws enshrined in that treaty.
	While we continue to have nuclear weapons of mass destruction, we are clearly in breach of article VI of the treaty, which calls for each party to the treaty to enter into negotiations at an early date in good faith to achieve nuclear disarmament. That is not happening. Article I forbids any country that has signed up to the NPT, including countries that possess nuclear weapons, to collaborate directly or indirectly with any other country on nuclear weapons. It is obvious that Trident breaks this article. We breach article VI because, as the Secretary of State for Defence admitted,
	Negotiations to implement Article VI have not yet commenced and are not scheduled.[Official Report, 26 February 2004; Vol. 418, c. 498W.]
	Because Trident represents a significant increase in our capability, it is in breach of article VI as a serious act of proliferation. Even if the number of warheads is kept similar to the number deployed on Polaris, the qualitative difference in targeting capacity and accuracy of the missile system makes it a much more potent weapon. On 16 June 2002 an Atomic Weapons Establishment spokesperson at Aldermaston told The Observer that
	it had to maintain the capability to design a successor
	to Trident. Once again, that breaks articles of the non-proliferation treaty.
	The UK is in breach of article I of the NPT, which states:
	Each nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly.
	The Trident nuclear WMD system was bought from the USA and its warheads were tested in the USA, which provides targeting technology and command and control support. By any judgment that is indirect support. I would argue that it is direct support.
	What is particularly disgraceful about the continued military co-operation between the United States and the UK, which neither Tory nor, apparently, new Labour Administrations can grasp, is that these countries are two of the three depository states for the NPT. In effect, the treaty is held in trust by them. How do they show their respect? By breaking the very first article of the treaty.
	The bilateral US/UK mutual defence agreement on atomic energy matters dating from 1958, which facilitates this co-operation, comes up for renewal later this year. It should be cancelled as an international gesture of good faith. Until decision makers and law makers in the nuclear armed powers recognise that the US and the UK in particular have obligations as part of the NPT bargain, no amount of lecturing other states how to behave in the face of nuclear proliferation temptations will have any credibility. If we continue to ignore the NPT or to break its articles, the greater will be the global threat of nuclear weapons.
	The policy of successive Governments, Tory and Labour, is that we simultaneously support both our non-proliferation treaty commitments to nuclear disarmament and our need to retain nuclear weapons of mass destruction to protect our national security. Some might perceive a significant internal inconsistency in those policy positionsindeed, some might consider them to be in direct contradiction. That is in stark contrast with a decision that was taken at a Labour party conference in the early 1990s that we, as a future Labour Government, would, among other things, scrap Trident.
	In 1985, the UN Secretary-General, opening a review conference on the non-proliferation treaty stated:
	The most safe, sure and swift way to deal with the threat of nuclear arms is to do away with them in every regard. This should be our vision of the future. No more testing. No more production. No more sales or transfers. Reduction and destruction of all nuclear weapons and the means to make them should be humanity's common cause.
	Sadly, almost 20 years later they are more of a threat than they were when those words were first spoken.
	In my opinion, nuclear weapons will continue to be a threat to global security if we continue to ignore our obligations under the non-proliferation treaty. My hopes, and those of many other people committed not only to the anti-nuclear cause, but to world peace, are embodied in the NPT. If this Government and the Government of the United States continue to treat that treaty with contempt, the hopes of world peace and of avoiding nuclear catastrophe will be sorely diminished.

Bill Rammell: I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Blaenau Gwent (Llew Smith) on giving us the opportunity to air these exceedingly important issues. In the time available to me, I hope not only to respond to several of the points that he raised, but to set out the Government's overall position on the possession of nuclear weapons and on nuclear proliferation. I hope to rebut some of the very serious accusations that he made.
	The Government's policy on nuclear weapons remains that which was set out in the 1998 strategic defence review and the 2003 defence White Paper. We are explicitly committed to working towards a safer world in which there is no requirement for nuclear weapons and where we continue to play a full role in international efforts to strengthen arms control and to prevent the proliferation of hugely critical chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
	However, because of the continuing risk from the proliferation of nuclear weaponswhich I genuinely believe to be one of the most serious threats that we face in the modern worldand the certainty that a number of countries will retain substantial nuclear arsenals, our minimum nuclear deterrent capability, which is currently represented by Trident, is likely to remain a necessary element of our security. We nevertheless continue to support multilateral negotiations towards mutual, balanced and verifiable reductions in nuclear weapons worldwide. When we are satisfied that sufficient progress has been made to allow us to include British nuclear weapons in any negotiations without endangering our security interests, we shall most certainly do so.
	Let me deal with the key arguments that my hon. Friend advanced in respect of our progress in meeting article VI of the non-proliferation treaty. We remain fully committed to all aspects of the NPT regime, including global and verifiable nuclear disarmament. In contrast to my hon. Friend's comments, we have an excellent record on fulfilling our NPT obligations on nuclear disarmament. Looking at the issue objectively across the world, we are justly recognised as the most forward leaning of the nuclear weapons statesalthough one would not have believed that in listening to my hon. Friend.
	It is worthwhile setting out in some detail what we have done to meet the provisions of the article.
	First, we withdrew and dismantled the RAF's freefall nuclear bomb, so that Trident is now our only nuclear weapons system.
	Secondly, we dismantled the UK's last Chevaline warhead in 2002, demonstrating our commitment to irreversibility in reductions in the UK's nuclear weapons.
	Thirdly, we reduced our operationally available stockpile to fewer than 200 warheadsthat is a reduction of more than 70 per cent since the end of the cold war in the potential explosive power of our nuclear forces.
	Fourthly, we have reduced the readiness of our nuclear forces so that only a single Trident submarine is now on deterrent patrol, carrying 48 warheads. The submarine on patrol is normally on several days' notice to fire, and its missiles are de-targeted. I believe that all of those are significant de-escalatory measures.
	Fifthly, we signed and ratified the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty and continue to promote its early entry into force.
	Sixthly, we have placed fissile material no longer required for defence purposes under international safeguards. We have also continued to press for negotiations to begin at the conference on disarmament in Geneva on a fissile material cut-off treaty. Indeed, we stopped the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons and other nuclear explosive devices some time ago.
	Finally, in respect of these specific measures under the NPT regime, we signed and ratified the relevant protocols to both the treaty of Rarotonga, in relation to the south Pacific nuclear weapons-free zone, and the treaty of Pelindaba, in relation to the African nuclear weapons-free zone. All those actions have been undertaken since 1997 as a result of the commitment of this Government.

Llew Smith: The Minister has cited many reasons and many weapons to prove that we are supporting article VI of the NPT. He has not yet mentioned Trident, or told the House how that fits in with the NPT. While I am on my feet, will he tell us whether, in certain circumstances and under certain conditions, he would be willing to press the nuclear button?

Bill Rammell: I am going to discuss the issue of Trident explicitly in a moment. Before I do so, I want to emphasise that all the measures that I have outlined are significant steps that this Labour Government have taken since 1997, in accordance with our NPT obligations.
	My hon. Friend questioned the legality of our possession of nuclear weapons, but it is very clear, in terms of the view of the International Court of Justice on this issue, that our nuclear weapons possession and capability is in accordance with international law. It is important to make that point very clearly. He also referred to the views of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence, and it is important to put in context what my right hon. Friend said. He made it very clear that the circumstances in which any use of nuclear weapons might have to be contemplated would be extremely remote, and that we would use them only in extreme circumstances of self-defence and in accordance with our obligations under international law. That is a very different slant from the one that my hon. Friend put on that proposition.
	The UK continues to play a full part in the NPT review process. Indeed, we played a key role in achieving international agreement to the final document that was produced at the last NPT review conference in 2000. We have made considerable progress on the 13 steps set out in that final document. At the second session of the preparatory committee for the 2005 review conference, which was held in Geneva in April and May last year, we issued a working paper on our research into methodologies for the verification of nuclear disarmament. That is a cause that we intend to continue to pursue.
	Let me now turn to whether the possession of Trident is consistent with the spirit of article I. I would certainly contend that we are not in breach of article I. The Government have repeatedly made it clear that the UK nuclear deterrent is, and always has been, independent. The UK's nuclear weapons cannot be part of a US system, as the transfer by a nuclear weapon state of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, or control over such weapons or explosive devices, is prohibited under article I of the NPT. We have, of course, purchased from the US Trident missile bodies on which we mount our nuclear warheads, which are manufactured at the Atomic Weapons Establishment. Those missiles are carried on UK-built Vanguard class submarines. Decisions on whether to replace Trident are not needed during this Parliament, but are likely to be required in the next one. We will therefore continue to take appropriate steps to ensure that the range of options for maintaining a nuclear deterrent capability is kept open until that decision point.
	My hon. Friend made a number of points about Israel and the middle east. It is undoubtedly the case that a peaceful and secure middle east is a critical and continuing goal of this Government's foreign policy. We are strong advocates of a middle east WMD-free zone, which we believe to be an important part of any solution to the conflict there.
	We support the principle generally of the establishment of such nuclear weapons-free zones. Indeed, we have already signed in conjunction with the other nuclear weapons states recognised under the NPT protocols to four such agreements covering Latin America, the south Pacific, Africa and Antarctica. In that context, we therefore continue to support the proposal for a middle east nuclear weapons free-zone. Indeed, since it was formulated in United Nations Security Council resolution 687 in 1991, the UK has supported the wider idea of a middle east free of all weapons of mass destruction. I genuinely believe that working towards that objective can only contribute to the prospects for a wider settlement of the region's problems.

Llew Smith: Will the Minister now answer the question whether, under the extreme circumstances referred to by the Secretary of State for Defence, he too would be willing to press the nuclear button?

Bill Rammell: I set out very clearly the position on our possession and use of nuclear weapons: they would be used only in extreme circumstances of self-defence. That point is very clear.
	Let me return to the issue of the middle east. My hon. Friend made a number of comments on the situation in Israel. We have made it clear that we want Israel to sign up to the NPT as a non-nuclear state and we will continue to argue that point. It is also important that, in any debate on nuclear weapons and the dangers that we face, we also consider the considerable dangers that we face from the proliferation of nuclear weapons materials across the world. I said earlier that that is one of the most significant threats that we face in the modern world. We have to ensure that we are vigilant about and focused on it. That is why, for example, we have committed ourselves to the global partnership.
	In June 2002, the Prime Minister made a commitment of up to 400 million over 10 years to tackle the weapons legacy of the former Soviet Uniona significant step forward. Those activities are aimed directly at reducing the proliferation risks posed by that weapons legacy. As the Foreign Secretary said in his written statement of 25 February, it is intended that that work should be expanded to include other states such as Libya and Iraq. We are undertaking a scoping study, looking at the requirements for co-operative threat reduction work in Libya. We are working alongside the United States to gauge the needs in Iraq.
	It is also within that context that we consider the important proliferation security initiative, which was launched in May 2003. The UK has rightly been one of a core group of countries working to drive that initiative forward. The PSI aims to prevent trafficking in weapons of mass destruction and related technology by states and non-state actorsfor example, terrorist groups or criminal networksthrough increased interdiction efforts. That is hugely important.
	The prospect that such weapons capability can get into the hands of terrorists who have no regard for human rights or for the effect of their actions is one of the most serious and dangerous threats that we face. We must work multilaterally to ward off the dangers that exist in that regard and it is critical that we remain focused on those issues.
	I understand the concerns that my hon. Friend has raised: none of us who has lived through the cold war and the continuing dangers, threats and risks that exist with nuclear weapons can look on those issues with equanimity. The track record that I have described, our commitments under the non-proliferation regime and the significant steps that we have taken since 1997 to reduce our nuclear weapons on a multilateral and verifiable basis emphasise that we are committed to working for peace throughout the world, reducing weapons of mass destruction and protecting ourselves from such weapons. The Government are committed to those aims and will continue to take their arguments forward.
	Question put and agreed to.
	Adjourned accordingly at half-past Nine o'clock.